“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
No, not that sort of success.
Rather, the innate variety: health, wellbeing, (inner) peace.
But we don’t see it.
(I know it sounds weird, but why would you seek something you already are?)
Instead, we spend a lifetime out ‘there’ pursuing a series of important but often futile goals.
And where do they leave us?
Longing for more (meaning in our lives).
I know all this sounds so Woo Woo, but as someone who’s travelled a few miles on the success track, it was only when I dropped out of my ego that I began to understand that to live at peace I had to journey within. This meant inviting a more beautiful question than “What’s next?” and replacing it with something more meaningful, namely “Who am I?”. When I say meaningful, I don’t mean in the sense that the words were of greater import but to take me in a completely different direction.
Let me try to put this a slightly different way. As a species, we’re wired for success. Look at evolution. OK, it’s not always been pretty and often it’s been quite destructive of us and the world we inhabit, but we’ve survived and thrived at least on the material plane. But where we’ve got stuck is believing that to be happy we’ve to pursue something external to us or ‘manage’ our circumstances. But it’s a lie. If we want to be truly happy we need to understand that we’re already whole, spiritually well and grounded in wisdom. You know this when you drop out of your thinking and feel a boundless sense of the universal.
But of course trying to drop out of your ego is incredibly difficult when we live in the experience of our thinking. And more pernicious still is the fact that we believe, as I’ve already said, that our experience comes from out there. It doesn’t. Our experience is generated 100% by our thoughts.
Where does this leave you on the success journey?
Nowhere. And everywhere.
The truth is you don’t have to go anywhere; or strive for anything. And most especially you don’t need to identify with your thinking beyond the day to day needs to stay alive, i.e. to eat and stay out of harm’s way.
I know this sounds incredibly unproductive when set against a series of goals, dreams and wishes but, trust me, the moment you wake up to true self is the moment you understand that to make the most of our innate success you need do nothing more than tap your inner wisdom. Do that, and there will be no need to do anything more than be 100% you.