How do you define success? Where in your life are you burning most to succeed? Is it in your relationships? Achieving balance? Finding the perfect way to serve your community? Even if you think you know the answer, and we all think we know, it is worth asking the question over and over again. If we don’t want to ask ourselves this every day, then perhaps once a week will suffice.
The reason is simple. We tend to get distracted from our course in increments that are not obvious enough to notice at first. So asking ourselves this question regularly helps to keep our track clean and it helps to keep us current. Creating success from a vision we had a year ago -or even three months ago- can actually hemorrhage energy and enthusiasm for the journey.
So, how do you define success from here; today? Perhaps it is the right career, or greater satisfaction and reward from the one you have right now. To athletes, success can mean obtaining that gold medal, to parents’ success can mean raising children with good moral values, to doctors, success can mean saving a life and to some it can mean a job promotion or acquiring wealth. You get the idea.
Why is success often difficult to achieve? One reason is that the definition -whatever it may be- has an expiration date. We tend to define success from a perspective that is rooted in the conditions we were in when we dreamt it up. So the impetus for our vision of success, to a greater or lesser extent, is simply a reaction to those conditions. In fact, you could substitute the word Success for Solution.
Success, whilst we want it to be fun, and to present countless opportunities for fulfillment and happiness it is also, and without exception, a perceived solution to something we wish to avoid ...or protect ourselves from.
When the conditions we wish to avoid shift, even slightly, the original impetus begins to lose its relevance. How we get there, our sense of urgency around it, and perhaps even how we feel about the pursuit itself, will begin to shift also. If we continue to assume we still know what success is, (based on conditions that are no longer apply in quite the same anymore) we allow a kind of rift to develop between us and our facility to get there. The dynamics or issues that no longer apply to the present still influence us. But like a ship's navigator who continues to use the departing port as the solo point of reference rather than including calculations for where the ship is currently, your deviation from a true trojectory for success will take on tremendous significance over the course of your journey. You can bet that you will not get where you a want to… fulfillment and happiness.
Ask yourself often to assess your success/solution for changes. This practice alone will help you manage the build-up of irrelevant information that no longer applies. It will position you to more efficiently see the forces actually at work in your life at any given time. Save yourself the trouble of it getting in your way through old wounds, painful memories or a fear whose main power is the fear itself. These will only take you off course as you travel and make your task harder. They will force you to take longer, and in the end there is a very high risk that they will maneuver you somewhere that, for you, turns out to be no ‘solution’ at all.
Those who walk through life making an attempt to accomplish “success” through someone else’s standards or through the standards of one’s society will never ‘feel’ successful, and even worse, they will never be fulfilled. Hence the ones who say, “… and when I achieved everything I set out to achieve, I found I was still not happy.”
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