New Delhi, Sept. 3 -- Anyone who has lain awake at night knows that sleep cannot be chased. The harder we reach for it, the further it seems. We can prepare the ground- dim the room, still the body, set the day's worries down-but the last step is not ours to take. Sleep comes only once we stop trying to seize it. Reaching for it is what keeps it away.

We tend to think that calm and ambition pull in opposite directions-that the contemplative life sits on one side and the competitive life on the other, and that to find peace, a person must step back from the contest. There is something to this. A striving mind is rarely a quiet one.

But step back, and something curious happens. The habit of comparing oneself with others, of measuring wher...