Rightful Success
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.