Just Behind the Door

What if your life at this exact moment is trying to teach you a lesson about genuine success and happiness. What do you think that lesson would be? What would you defined as success in your life? Is it highly individualistic or amazingly similar to others?

Early on in life we may hear people defining success as achieving the dream job, acquiring wealth, a multitude of friends and being able to call their own shots? In my decades of living this list sounds like a work of fiction rather than real life. We hear a similar type of thinking when someone says, ‘If I could only win the lottery I would buy…go…and do… and then I would be happy.’ Not really, the research is quite clear, most people who win the lottery end up worse off both financially and emotionally later in life. They do not deem their lives to have been happy or successful even with the windfall of money. Why is that? Maybe success in life is simpler than we think.

The people I know who are successful have worked hard, very hard in fact, to achieve something. They understand the need to delay their own gratification while working toward a longer term goal. Friends? They do not have a multitude of friends but a few very close friends and family that care deeply about them. They didn’t win the lottery but won something even better – confidence and pride in themselves. For them, success was not bought or sold but earned. There is no quick fix to success. They can see with pride the impact they have been able to make on others through their hard work. They have remained humble regardless of their accomplishments. Untouched by triumph and untroubled my failure. Challenges are viewed by them as opportunities from which to grow and learn. They realize that everyone has issues throughout their lives and that they did not draw the short straw. There is simply no inoculation available that allows immunity from life challenges or tragedies. We all receive exactly what we signed up for in this life – no more no less. Blaming others? Never…they accept responsibility for things that happen and realize that by blaming others they will never mature into adulthood. Age is a given, growing up is optional.

Research verifies these observations. When successful people have been interviewed in an attempt to understand how they achieved their success the answers were surprisingly simple. Hard work, integrity, caring for others, and working toward a vision and goals that they had set and reset became their mantra throughout their lives. There was no magic bullet, no Santa Claus, no winning lottery number but rather the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly work it takes to make a difference and achieve happiness and success.

Have a great few days!