Rightful Success

February 4th, 2022

Usually, we associate success with doing or achieving what we think we want. Very often we spend little, or no time at all, on finding out if there are more appropriate goals for us in the world, or if what we are already engaged in is actually what we truly need or want. This is a common issue for many people.

I’ve seen situations many times where someone achieves something good and yet there is no happiness in it for them, no satisfaction, and if they look carefully they realise that even from the beginning they didn’t actually want it. Of course a question arises: “But why did you work to achieve that?”. The answer is usually something like: “You see, in the beginning I thought I wanted it”.

What do we really want?

We feel some superficial impulses, we allow ourselves to be impressed and influenced by others’ successes, dreams or wishes and so build our own goals following suit. When we start an important action, how much time did we spend to clarify it? Usually, I dare say, it is very little.

Many of these wishes are based on conjuncture, superficial choices, and don’t find a deep and sustainable support in our being. This is the reason we find ourselves pushing and forcing ourselves towards this kind of (wrongful) success, usually ruining all the other aspects of our life in the process.

In other situations, one might have a very good idea, for example, to do some work for the benefit of others. It can be an honest desire and he goes for it, full engines on. But on the way, the person can become awfully busy doing this work, after a while finding that he has become an unhappy character in his ruined personal life. In this situation, it is difficult to find enough strength to finish the wonderful project he started initially. He achieves a partial success but with a lot of extra costs, ones that are sometimes so ‘expensive’ they can even cancel the benefit of that partial success.

Following our heart’s desire

To avoid these tragic situations, it is worth questioning what we truly aim for. This is valid for short-term goals as well as for the long-term ones. Always finding deeper aspirations and aiming to follow them, instead of picking up something that very often comes from the ‘environment’, allows us to choose our rightful goals by listening to our heart and thus correctly start the journey towards rightful success.

Once upon a time there was a famous archer. He had many apprentices but none of them was even close to being as skillful as he. He was extremely proud, and all his enemies were afraid of him. One day, he and a dozen of his followers went hunting. Reaching a dense forest, they noticed along their way many targets painted on tree trunks with an arrow stuck right in the middle. There were hundreds of such arrows, all in the middle of their target. The archer was astonished. Not even he would be capable of such a performance – all, right in the middle! He felt threatened. “Oh, so there is one better than me!”

He asked everybody they met about this mysterious warrior, but nobody knew anything. The tension was building, he became anxious and nervous. Soon, he saw a sweet 10 year-old girl carrying a small bucket with paint and a brush, uttering a playful song. He asked her, “Dear girl, do you know who shot these arrows into all these trees?”. With a candid smile, she answered, “Yes I know, I did!”.

“I am very serious, don’t provoke me. Tell me the truth!” said the warrior. “Not even I can do such a performance, it has to be the best archer in the world.” Totally unintimidated, and with a pure voice, the little girl said, “Let me tell you how I did this. I love to play with my bow and to shoot arrows into the trees, and I also like to paint, so wherever my arrow hits the tree, I go and paint a target.”

Where does my arrow go?

Sometimes people have come to me asking things like, “Please help me to achieve this or that.” It takes just three minutes of analysis and introspection before they realize, “Oh, now I see, I picked up this idea from TV.” Fulfilling these kind of superficial desires is not the success you need to pursue. This is not your success. It has nothing to do with your life, with your being. And, if you decide to go for it, it will create so much disruption and imbalance in yourself and in the environment around that all potential achievements and the enjoyment of it later on are implicitly cancelled. Maybe it is better to see where the arrow goes and paint the target there…

In conclusion, I advise you to always look for and find your deeper aspirations by diving into your heart, instead of making superficial jumps. Invest more time in this process when you decide to start a new action or project to find out if you are going toward your success – the rightful success. Be aware that the first step on the journey towards this rightful success is finding your inherent happiness. This is, of course, the result of some training of inner attitudes. [For more details, see article: Success and Happiness: Can We Have Them Both?]

Even for the actions that you have already started, it is possible to correct their course by going through this process of deeply analyzing if you are aiming for your rightful success, just as we can receive an updated address for our destination when we are on the way. We can always make the journey better and better, more and more harmonious, and with this there is no problem as long as our ‘tank’ of happiness is always full and available.

Read here the first article in the series …