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10 ‘Successful’ Reflections
Am I successful? Maybe not. But I’m qualified to ask these questions.
Commercial chatter about “how to achieve success!” usually sounds, to me, as if we’re supposed to know (1) what sorts of things or experience define “success,” (2) how we know when we achieve them, (3) how we avoid mistaken notions of success, (4) how to iterate our self-awareness as needed, (5) whether success can be inherent in the journey, (6) when to be content with what we have or who we are, (7) how to shift the focus off competition, (8) what our own moral boundaries are, (9) what sort of attitude we should take in responding to every opportunity, and (10) how we focus on the work that matters and ignore what doesn’t.
10 Reflections on ‘Success’
(1) Sure, success is personal, so you’ve got to make your own unique list of goals. But what sort of stuff would you put on the list? How do you know that certain wants or needs represent “success” rather than something you want or need for a different reason, like “fun” or “joy” or “dignity”?
(2) Given that the nature of feeling is to be, at every moment, at least slightly dissatisfied and tired and managing conflicting feelings and at disequilibrium and therefore “on the move,” how would you know when you’d “fully” achieved something you’d strived for?
(3) We have to envision an ideal, but in our imaginings we always distort what we long for. We also tend to churn away some of the goodness over time and begin to strive for “baser” profits and rewards which we rationalize as serving the goodness but which aren’t properly part of it. Often, it’s money. We want a little more cash in our pockets, allegedly so we can do more. Longer term, we institutionalize. Originally, we build the institution to serve an ideal, but eventually we’re just serving the institution. And sometimes success is about the tendency to join in a collective game and want whatever others say they want. In losing clear sight of the ideal, our desires corrupt, and in pursuing the corrupted version of our goals, we reveal ourselves as not yet worthy or capable of our own original ideal.
(4) So then we’re on the iterative step of once again making an effort to strip away our assumptions about money and…
