Ashok Gupta contrasts culturally promoted "left-brain" achievement values (success, money, fame, power) with an alternative emphasis on love, self-awareness, and personal growth. He reflects on his own shift from being an approval-seeking achiever to prioritizing helping others and learning to love himself, arguing that at life's end people value love and growth over material achievement.
It's about what we value in life. Society teaches us to value very left brain, kind of patriarch type values which are about achievement, success, money, fame, power, glory. And we have become trained unconsciously for those things to be the most important things in our lives. And it's recognizing that actually perhaps there's something else. Perhaps life could be about love. And perhaps it could be how much have we learned to love ourselves and to share love with others? How much have we learned about ourselves and being come more self aware and I believe, and I don't want to superimpose my beliefs on you, but I'll share what I believe. I used to be an achiever and a approval seeker. I didn't used to be a helper. But hopefully that's changed now. And hopefully I really want to help people. And I recognize now that the most important thing in life, when we get to the end of our lives, I believe that we'll ask ourselves, how much did we love? How much did we share love with others and share love with ourselves? And how much knowledge did we gain? How much knowledge and awareness did we gain of ourselves and our minds and other people around us? How much did we grow as human beings? And I feel that for me personally, those two things are going to be the most important things that I ask myself at the end of my life. I won't be asking myself, how much money did I earn? How much did I achieve compared to my peers? I don't think that's what will really matter. And when you ask people, what would you do if you had six months to live? They don't say, well, I wish I'll spend those next six months achieving as much as possible. They'll say, I'll choose to spend that time with the people that I love to tell them how much I love them. And I'll spend that time perhaps doing the things I've always wanted to do in life.
