What Does The Bhagavad Gita Teach Us About Success? | TKTS Clips

Success, happiness, and “prosperity in all endeavors” hinge less on tactics than on two inner filters: who a person listens to and whether they’re truly teachable. Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita—presented through Swami Satchitananda’s “The Living Gita” commentary—Kevin Trudeau frames the core lesson as a practical test. Listening to the right person without teachability won’t produce results; listening to the wrong person even with high teachability still leads to failure. The Gita’s setting—Arjuna facing a battlefield of family and former allies—becomes a template for how people respond when they’re overwhelmed and unsure what duty requires.

In the Gita’s opening exchange, Arjuna tells Krishna he’s “weak-minded,” confused, and unable to understand his duty, then asks for clear guidance. That posture—admitting ignorance and seeking instruction—is treated as the starting qualification for a sincere student. Teachability is defined as humility plus openness to change: the willingness to empty a mind that’s already “full” of fixed beliefs, to receive new knowledge without it spilling out as misunderstanding. Trudeau illustrates this with the “empty cup” metaphor and a Zen-style story where a teacher keeps pouring tea onto a cup that won’t accept more, because the student’s mind is already full.

The Gita’s student requirements are then distilled into a three-part formula: prostrate (as an attitude of humility, not necessarily literal submission), question with respect, and serve the teacher. Prostration is described as placing oneself “below” the teacher to become receptive—trusting that the teacher knows more—while still retaining the right to ask follow-up questions. Questioning is encouraged, but not as a way to trap the teacher or demand agreement on the student’s terms. Service is presented as the bridge between belief and transformation: spiritual knowledge isn’t absorbed through words alone, and the “lab” for spiritual learning is life itself—doing tasks assigned by the teacher (even menial work) to purify the ego and build readiness to receive.

Trudeau adds that teachability is also about the teacher-student energy dynamic. A teacher who is always learning is portrayed as the “greatest teacher,” while a teacher who claims to be the final authority risks becoming “hollow” and draining rather than replenishing. He supports the humility theme with a broader axiom: “the wise man learns from the fool, but the fool doesn’t learn from the wise man,” and points to examples like Jesus bowing down and being baptized by John the Baptist to argue that greatness includes submission and continual learning.

The takeaway is blunt: success isn’t just about finding guidance—it’s about receiving it correctly. The right teacher must be met with the right mindset (humility, openness, and willingness to change), and the student must back learning with service, patience, and a long-term commitment to clearing the ego so truth can actually “flow” in.