A Reframe About Pursuing Success
There are individuals everywhere who have all the external components that we would imagine define "success," yet there's no happiness underneath it all.
The truth is that no external thing can make you a happy person long term.
You can feel the short term hit of dopamine and happiness by acquiring or getting what you’ve always wanted externally, yet it’s just a matter of time where the “high” acquiring will wear off.
This may lead us to question what the term success means for us personally. Once we can define that more clearly for ourselves, it's less likely for us to go down a mindless and empty path toward gadgets, relationships and stuff that lead to nowhere.
Personal success looks different for all of us. Be true and consistent to what it looks like for you.
Here's a quote intended to help you get more clear about your own unique relationship with the concept of success.
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
I love this quote. It highlights an important path toward the kind of happiness and joy that benefits all within reach.
So often we can get caught in the trap of trying so hard to achieve to gain a certain result. For the record, I've become really weary of the word "trying" at this point in my life. "Trying" to make a certain something happen. "Trying" to attain the ideal relationship. "Trying" to make a certain amount of money. "Trying" to get to where the grass (in our heads) is greener. Too much trying can back fire and sends off an anxious and, at times, needy vibe.
Trying too hard, often, is the exact action that's keeping us from receiving what we desire.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all about goals and creating markers toward personal achievement, however there's an artful balance of knowing when to tug and when to loosen up. It's a skill to learn how to go after something with an attitude of openness and flexibility, but without need and desperation. Needless to say, the results of these two approaches are very different.
Practicing allowing and loosening your grip of the drivers seat of your life, sometimes is the specific ingredient needed to open up enough space for that thing you really want to sneak in.
Endless trying paired with no real satisfying results will lead us feeling empty and discouraged.
The irony is that when we let go and stop trying so hard we naturally begin to start living by enjoying what we do have. When we can find joy in what's already full in our lives, that's when things have an uncanny way of coming together and more good things are created.
Trust this. Follow what feels good. Follow what feels right in your heart vs. where your logical mind believes success lives. When you do this, the chances that you will experience the kind of happiness that's deep and sustaining is more likely.
* The above image was taken by photographer, Amy Lynn Bjornson.
