“I have not doubted for a single moment that you are Buddha, that you have reached the goal, the highest goal towards which so many thousands of Brahmans and sons of Brahmans are on their way. You have found salvation from death. It has come to you in the course of your own search, on your own path, through thoughts, through meditation, through realizations, through enlightenment. It has not come to you by means of teachings! And--thus is my thought, oh exalted one,--nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings!”...“The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands.” Siddartha, Herman Hesse
Prescriptions are instructions manuals. A to-do and how-to list. Methods, techniques, processes and procedures. They work for only the most basic level of requirements for anything. They work well for anything mechanical. However, when you venture into anything that matters at any level that matters, prescriptions or blueprints are useless.
We start with the dream or goal to achieve something. Then we add a prescription to get there. Follow the prescription and you’ll get to the promised land. The prescription now acts as an intermediary. Our minds will focus on the intermediary, which means we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to achieve the intermediary. In all great achievement, if you try and break down what someone did into a recipe and follow that recipe, you won’t become them. You’ll become the recipe.
The next Mark Zuckerberg will not start a social media company. The next Larry Page won’t start a search engine. The next Elon Musk won’t start car and aerospace companies. If a world-class successful individual had to go back in time and retrace their steps again, but this time mimic themselves. They would fail. Success came from playing their own unique frequency in their own set and setting. Not the mimicry of other frequencies, sets and settings. The cult of Lean Startup, Customer Development and Case Studies only work for the most basic mechanical things. All unsuccessful products, teams and companies are alike, all successful are unalike in their own unique way.
This is deeply contradictory to conventional wisdom and human behaviour. We are a deeply mimetic species. We’ve survived and adapted by following the tribe. Our brains are pattern-recognition machines. We find comfort in wisdom, advice, prescriptions and conventions. We are deeply habitual creatures. We are conditioned. However, “enlightenment”, salvation, success and progress in any of life’s endeavours are not attained by any prescriptions.