Some of the greatest
thinkers of all time have struggled to come up
with 'the true meaning of success'.
So, who better than the woefully
under-qualified me to
clear things up for everyone.
Obsessed With Success
People who consciously practice personal development tend to have at
least one thing in common - they all 'want to be successful'.
This throws up a few immediate questions, like:
What does it mean to be a success?
Can we ever hope to 'succeed' if we have not first
defined the parameters for what success means to us?
Leading on from that, is it possible that you could
in fact already be a success, and have simply failed to notice?
Is there a universal, true meaning of success, that
we can tap into and use to our advantage in our quest to be successful?
Why Now?
It's with these questions in mind that I sit here, cramped and tired on
a London Underground train, pondering whether I am, in fact, a success
after all.
Perhaps you can relate to my situation, whereby a large proportion of
my stresses seem to come from a near-obsessive focus with whether I am
successful enough yet. I often catch myself wondering how much further
I have to go & what I have to achieve in order 'to be a success'.
To put this in context, I have just walked out of a high-paying sales
consultancy project after just one and a half days (which was scheduled
to last for 10), due to the intense dislike I have (and clearly forgot
I had!) for cold calling sales prospects.
Does it make me a
failure that I couldn't 'mind over matter'
my abject misery, and continue to sell despite my discomfort
and desire to be doing (almost) anything else?
Or am I a success because I can clearly define what I DON'T want, and
had the balls (and the sense) to remove myself from a situation that
was clearly causing me more harm than good?
What About You?
Can you relate to where I'm coming from?
Do you remove yourself from situations that make you feel overly upset
and overwhelmed? Or do you plough on regardless, adhering to the mantra
that 'what don't kill me makes me stronger?' Or worse - do you
carry on because you don't believe you can do / deserve any better?
The probable answer is 'a bit of both'. Odds are, if you're like 90+%
of the population (admittedly an uneducated guess), your current career
causes you to experience lots of negative emotions on a daily basis,
even if they are at the lower end of the 'I need to go on a killing
rampage' scale. You may want to do something different, but fear of the
unknown keeps you from taking a leap into the abyss.
So... are you a success for continuing to go in, pouring your time and
energy and heart into causes that don't really matter to you?
Or would you be
more of a success if you quit tomorrow
to pursue a dream, even if you didn't have the first clue
as to how you could make your dream viable?
Maybe the true meaning of success is having the kahunas to follow
dreams, even when by conventional standards you are taking a huge risk.
Follow Your Bliss
If you've read much of my stuff before, you'll probably guess my
argument here: namely, to be a true success means that you must have
the courage to walk away from things / people / activities that cause
you to feel crappy (or worse).
In fact, in recent months I have been adhering to Joseph Campbell's
philosophy of 'follow your bliss'.
For those of you unaware of Campbell's work (I only found him recently
via Philosophers
Notes), one of his
basic arguments is that your level of success is judged by the amount
you 'follow your bliss' - i.e. how often you do the things that make
you feel happy, whole and fulfilled.
Campbell
suggests that the more we follow our bliss, the happier we will feel
and the more of a success we will be.
I truly get where the dude is coming from, but does this mean that we
can (and should) turn our backs on anything that makes us unhappy?
Should we? Or is this just an idealistic, unrealistic and unworkable
notion?
In short, is the true meaning of success the absolute refusal to do
anything that compromises our happiness?
My honest answer: I don't know yet.
No More Cold Calling:
Success or Quitter?
My gut feelings when walking out of this consulting job were relief and
happiness. I swore to myself I'd never resort to cold-calling again. I
realised that the pros (good money, praise) were dramatically
outweighed by the cons (hating the feeling of selling something I don't
particularly care for, feeling that I am wasting my time).
But I also couldn't shake the sense that I had failed at something I
had committed to do. I promised my client ten days of work, and
delivered only 1/8 of that.
Can it even be
possible that you can be both a failure and a success at the
same time?
Factors to Consider
After dwelling on this for the past few hours, I'm still really no
closer to a definitive answer. I guess life ain't quite as black and
white as we'd like it to sometimes be.
I do truly believe that we should do what makes us happy. I think we
should try and look into our soul, to see what it really wants from
life (as hippy-ish as that sounds).
Meditation,
dream
exploration, self-hypnosis,
visualization
and other
consciousness-raising activities can help us to communicate with our
deeper, wiser, higher self - yet even with these practices most people
are still confused as to what they truly want. At times I still wonder
what my purpose is, and I spend most of my waking hours chewing on this
very question.
As much as I do
believe you should 'follow your bliss', I
reckon we should also push ourselves to operate outside
of our comfort zones. We should do things that force us to
grow, and push ourselves to reach our highest potential.
Conversely, we should avoid those activities that make us feel bad,
wrong, uncomfortable, unhappy or sick-to-our-stomach.
The True Meaning of
Success
I guess the closest I can come to defining the 'true meaning of
success' is:
1) committing to doing what you
love, and
2) knowing that to get there you
must do things which make you grow
(which you don't necessarily enjoy), whilst
3) avoiding things that make you
deeply unhappy.
According to that definition, I was right to leave my consulting
job.
Why?
Because whilst staying would certainly have helped me grow (step 2),
the role made me deeply unhappy, which violates the final part of the
principle, and thus compromises my success.
If I would have stayed, I reckon I would have been more of a failure. I
feel like I made the right choice.
Are You a Success?
Over to you now.
According to my three step principle above, are you a success?
Does
your chosen career path make you a success?
Are you at least on the
right path?
If you are, congratulations. Continue to follow your bliss dude/ette.
Whilst the road will not always be paved with gold and marshmallows and
cash and love, if you repeatedly take steps towards your dream life, it
is inevitable that you will arrive there sooner of later.
Conversely, if you are not doing (or trying to do) what you love, and
you are not pushing yourself to grow, and you are actively engaging in
activities that make you unhappy, get off the (wrong!) path my friend.
F**k it, you don't have to listen to me, but do you think you will
magically start to love what you do if you carry on as you are? Or do
you prefer to think that one day your depression and alienation will
transmute into apathy, and you'll simply come to accept your current
role in life?
I'm not here to preach. All I want to do is open your mind and ask you
to consider your actions and path. If you're not happy now - or working
towards worthy goals that truly matter to you - do you ever think
you'll stumble upon your bliss?
There is so much scope for you to do / be / achieve what you want. But
- and it's a BIG but - the unhappier you are, the less likely you are
to get there. You've got to be feeling good, putting out the good
vibes, and consciously stepping (leaping) towards your dream.
You gotta have the balls to take a blind leap of faith and trust
yourself to get where you want to be. Even if you just use 'away'
motivation to depart from your current woes, without really knowing
where you are going, it's gotta be better than carrying on the current
path regardless.
In short, I reckon that to be a success you have to SPRINT away from things that make
you unhappy, EMBRACE
challenges that make you grow (even if they are 'no fun'), and DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING that
makes you feel warm and fuzzy and child-like inside. That's the true meaning of success.
So now, why not scribble down a few ideas now as to what you really
want, what skills you'll need to get there, how far outside your
comfort zone you will have to go, and what you absolutely refuse to do
anymore
(or will stop doing as soon as feasibly possible).
You'll feel motivated, inspired and optimistic just by this simple act
of taking pen to paper, and we all know the crazy tendency of written
goals to materialise and manifest.
The True Meaning of
Success - Defined
In summary, after 1500 words of argument, I think the true meaning of
success can be summed up best with the concise (and genius) wisdom of
Bob Dylan:
'A man is a
success if he gets up in the morning and
gets to bed at night, and in between
he does what he wants to
do'.
Right on Bob. There's the true meaning of success right there.
Good luck people. Follow your bliss. Do what you wanna do. Avoid shit
that makes you feel crappy.
Simple, no?! ;)
PS - If you want to
respond to this post on the true meaning of success, add your own thoughts or join
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Some of the greatest
thinkers of all time have struggled to come up
with 'the true meaning of success'. 