What is success? Clearly defining, this has helped me a lot recently to step out of my old ways of thinking about success as winning and move into a new mindset of success as loving the life I have and loving the things in my life as they are.
To me, there's nothing I could do to be more successful than to love the life I have and ironically the more I love the life I have, the more I will keep having a life that I love.
I hope this short inspirational post is useful for you today and I trust you'll leave the feedback in the comments and thumbs up if you enjoy it. What I've been thinking about a lot is my definition of success. I assume the underlying beliefs about what success is.
For a lot of my life, I’d assumed and maybe I accepted the belief from others that success is doing better than others. When I get an ‘A’ in school, that's a success because I'm doing better than those other kids.
When I get into a good college that's a success because other people couldn't do that. When I'm in my business and I'm making money, I think that’s a success and especially when I'm competing with other people.
If I've got more followers than you, that's a success. When I've got more fancy equipment, that's a success. When I've got a nicer, prettier, healthier, and more handsome looking body than you, that's a success.
What I see today is that kind of success is very fleeting. It leaves a lot of unhappiness all over the place, especially in my life.
I said at one point that $10,000 a month is my standard for success and when I reached that, it wasn't successful anymore because there was someone else making $100,000 a month and now success became $100,000 a month instead of $10,000 a month.
What happened when I successfully achieved my target?
My idea of success for a following was to have a hundred thousand followers. Guess what? My next success went to a million followers and then to 2 million followers.
When I looked at success that way, I often thought about how do I get what I want to meet my definition of success instead of how do I really help other people out to the point where I'll be given that.
This allowed me to do a lot of things like paid ads, for example, on Facebook to pile on as many likes as possible at the lowest cost without considering what value I'm giving as much.
Now, I think a lot about what value I'm giving and I define success as enjoying my life as it is.
This is really helpful on days where things don't go as expected, for example, last night I went to bed at 10 o'clock with my wife after another successful day. I woke up at 10:50 AM to my son crying and I went in there and helped him go back to sleep and woke up at 2:00 AM to my daughter needing help and my wife going in there.
Then I went back and slept in my other bed where I originally was sleeping. Then at 5:00 AM, my son woke up. My wife went in there. My daughter then woke up and I went to sleep next to her to comfort her.
What is Success?
That to me is a success because I enjoyed doing all of that. I felt no pity or sorry for myself. Success is loving the life I've chosen. I've done a lot to have a life with a family and success is to be there and help out those family members when they need it.
I'm so grateful because that's a big difference from before and there was an absence of fear. There was no fear like Oh my God, I'm not gonna get enough sleep because I'm being successful.
I'm helping and I will get enough sleep for myself. Today, I feel very well-rested despite being woken up an hour after I went to sleep and then 3 hours after that and then 3 more hours after that. I still feel very well-rested.
That to me is a success. I don't need to achieve anything outside myself and ironically the more I feel that way, the more life reinforces how I feel. “Oh, you love your life as it is? Well, we'll give you more things that you will love just as they are”.
When I kept chasing some idea of success and kept thinking I had to get something like more followers or more money then I kept getting them and life kept reinforcing that I needed more followers.
Today, I finally looked at and asked myself, where does it end? I have several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. I have 2 million followers. Isn't that enough?
Now that's not to say I don't ever need to share my message in things like ads to help people discover who might otherwise discover something else. To have an ad that might really help someone and make a big difference in their day versus whatever else might be there.
That's not to say I don't reach out, share, try and carry my message to anyone who's interested in it. It’s that I feel successful with what I have today.
I am wealthy today regardless of what my bank account says because I love what I have. I have enough for today. I help other people to feel and be in the same existence.
Thus, I encourage & suggest you take a look at what your definition of success is and ironically the more you love, enjoy and find success in your everyday existence, the more if you're like me, you’ll keep getting more outward signs of success.
The more I love the followers I have, the more I get new followers. The more I love the business I have and the money I make, the more I make and the more I love the business I have.
That's not to say I don't get frustrated sometimes but even when I do get frustrated, that's my biggest opportunity to prove what I'm saying. When I do get frustrated, it’s my opportunity to prove myself successful and say well.
Success is just loving what I have including its frustrations and downsides. Including things that may not be likable or are in progress of being changed.
I hope this is helpful for you today which is why I've made it and to me, that’s a success. I've shared something that's helpful to me that might be useful to you and then whatever else happens, that's fine.
However many views it gets, that's good enough for me because it has made a difference in your life. Thank you for reading this. I love you and you're awesome.
You may also like to read this: Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/what-is-success/