The Day I Realised My Life Doesn’t Belong to Me
~ Why the Greatest Work Is Never Done for Profit
“Without personal motive, human beings will never give their best.”
You have probably heard this line (or some version of it) in boardrooms, motivational seminars, start-up pitches, and even family dinner tables. It is treated as an obvious law of nature, like gravity.
The great spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran called this statement the ultimate insult to human nature. And the older I get, the more I see he was right.
Everywhere I look, the finest work humanity has ever produced was prompted not by profit motive, but by love.
Love, properly understood, is the sincere wish for the ultimate good of someone (or something) as best as it can possibly be.
A mother at 3 a.m. feeding her crying baby is not thinking about her hourly rate.
Van Gogh kept painting sunflowers though he sold almost nothing in his lifetime.
Ramanujan filled notebooks with mathematics in a tiny room in Madras because the equations sang to him.
The unknown soldier falls on the grenade.
The village teacher stays two extra hours with the child everyone else gave up on.
None of them were optimising for personal gain in the ordinary sense. Yet the intensity, creativity, and endurance they showed make the merely “incentivised” work look pale and tired.Life as a TrustEknath Easwaran used a simple but revolutionary analogy:Your life is a Trust.
You and I are only trustees.We have been temporarily entrusted with certain assets:
You start asking, “Have I magnified the gift that was entrusted to me?”Paradoxically, that is the moment people start giving their absolute best; not because someone is watching, paying, or praising, but because they finally understand the assignment.The Hidden Tax of Selfish MotiveSelfish motive can produce tremendous effort. Fear, greed, ambition, and the desire for status have built empires and sent rockets to the moon.But there is always a hidden tax: restlessness, comparison, burnout, emptiness at the top.Work done for love or as an act of trusteeship carries no such tax. The energy is self-renewing. You are not spending your life; you are investing the trust, and the returns come back as joy, meaning, and an inexplicable surplus of strength.I have seen it in ordinary people:
They are carrying the liberating lightness of “This is a trust; and I will give it everything I’ve got.”That, and only that, is when human beings truly give their best.Not because they must.
But because, finally, they understand they may.
If this perspective shifts something in you, try living it for a week and let the results speak.The life you save; and magnify; may be your own.
“Without personal motive, human beings will never give their best.”
You have probably heard this line (or some version of it) in boardrooms, motivational seminars, start-up pitches, and even family dinner tables. It is treated as an obvious law of nature, like gravity.
The great spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran called this statement the ultimate insult to human nature. And the older I get, the more I see he was right.
Everywhere I look, the finest work humanity has ever produced was prompted not by profit motive, but by love.
Love, properly understood, is the sincere wish for the ultimate good of someone (or something) as best as it can possibly be.
A mother at 3 a.m. feeding her crying baby is not thinking about her hourly rate.
Van Gogh kept painting sunflowers though he sold almost nothing in his lifetime.
Ramanujan filled notebooks with mathematics in a tiny room in Madras because the equations sang to him.
The unknown soldier falls on the grenade.
The village teacher stays two extra hours with the child everyone else gave up on.
None of them were optimising for personal gain in the ordinary sense. Yet the intensity, creativity, and endurance they showed make the merely “incentivised” work look pale and tired.Life as a TrustEknath Easwaran used a simple but revolutionary analogy:Your life is a Trust.
You and I are only trustees.We have been temporarily entrusted with certain assets:
- Time
- Energy
- Skills & Talent
- Enthusiasm
- Money
- Relationships
- Even this body and mind
You start asking, “Have I magnified the gift that was entrusted to me?”Paradoxically, that is the moment people start giving their absolute best; not because someone is watching, paying, or praising, but because they finally understand the assignment.The Hidden Tax of Selfish MotiveSelfish motive can produce tremendous effort. Fear, greed, ambition, and the desire for status have built empires and sent rockets to the moon.But there is always a hidden tax: restlessness, comparison, burnout, emptiness at the top.Work done for love or as an act of trusteeship carries no such tax. The energy is self-renewing. You are not spending your life; you are investing the trust, and the returns come back as joy, meaning, and an inexplicable surplus of strength.I have seen it in ordinary people:
- The carpenter who treats every joint as if it were for God’s own house.
- The accountant who stays late to help a struggling startup because “someone once did it for me.”
- The nurse who sings to a dying patient she will never meet again.
They are carrying the liberating lightness of “This is a trust; and I will give it everything I’ve got.”That, and only that, is when human beings truly give their best.Not because they must.
But because, finally, they understand they may.
If this perspective shifts something in you, try living it for a week and let the results speak.The life you save; and magnify; may be your own.