Build Your Successful Life

What does your success look like?
You move from one successful feeling to the next.
Your success changes from time to time, as you age.
The best success that you should look for is, will you be successful when you die.

When you die, what will be your measure of success?
Is it money?
Is it a relationship?
Is it the group of people whom you have helped, who will continue to work to be a success when they die?
Is it a legacy that continues to help others to be successful, in their own unique way?

Now the question I have for myself (probably to you) is, are you doing something that helps you become successful when you die.
Hold on to that thought as it will lead you to better decisions as you live your life and as the opportunities pan out with you.

Living reality is all about choices you have and decisions you make..
The decisions depend on those choices.
Are these choices the same choices made by a set of Happy people?
Do these choices have some unhappy aspects to it (pre, during and post)?
Are you willing and ready to embrace all of it that comes out as a result of your decision to opt for a choice?

(Hint: Take the choices that made other people happy. You may not have to reinvent the world in your fleeting lifetime!).

When you decide on a choice, most often, we may not know where it will lead to.
What we may have is the genuine resolve to put 100% of your TIST (time, intellect, Sweat and tears) in each of your present moments.
What we need to have is the resilience to stay the course and persist with it, one day at a time, one decision at a time, one simple task at a time, one baby step at a time.

(Hint: Some of the things that gives happiness for sure, is to have a family, or belong to a community or have something exciting that brings you ALIVE in each of your present moment, even when you are on the death bed or the fag end of your life!)

Do you really need to care about all these choices and decisions to be made?
Fair question.
If you do not have an agenda, then you will be working on (and for) someone else's agenda.
In that path, you may lose yourself, completely?
And when you retire, you 'may not know who you really are' or that realization that 'You don't know who is your ME in your life'.

Let's get back to the idea of SUCCESS.

There are internal measures of yours.
(Quiz: List 7 internal measures of your success!)

There are external measures of others.
(Quiz again: List 7 internal measures of others)

As you work yourself to be a success, there will always be a tussle between these internal measures and external measures.
Enjoy dealing with them. Immerse yourself to get to know the outcomes of those 'classic tussles'.

(Hint: You may be successful if your internal measures of success have higher power on you than the external measures of how others see your success!)

In this tussle, you will know that there are few things you are PROUD of.
You will know a few things for which you are rewarded for.
The crux of this realization is that the things that you are not proud of may not get you the rewards, and the things that get you the rewards, may not be something you are proud of.
So, again, there is a decision that you need to make.
Should you pursue things that you are proud of , or the things that will get you reward.

(Hint: Go for the things that you are proud of.
Why?
The rewards are not permanent.
The proud feeling is a permanent internal measure of success.
For your entire life, even on your deathbed.
Isn't it?)

Let me encore on that.
The world always changes, all the time.
So, again the rewards, which you may not value now, may become valuable in the future.
(Hint: Health, for example! Or the relationship that you have with your daughter as she becomes an adult!).

The moments you felt proud about at that time of that feeling may not be of any significance a few moons from that moment. (Hint: Like making that presentation to the board, on the day of your younger daughter's 8th birthday. Or going for a reward function, where you won a reward, on the day your family had a medical emergency and you were no where closer to help or be with them!).

(Well, now you are getting the hang of this complexity of living a simple life!)

(Random Quiz: Do you want the same things that you wanted at 22 when you are 52? Enumerate them. Spend a minute on the listed items. Have fun (or pain)!)

In your pursuit for success, if you take up someone else's route to their success, it may lead you to failure.
Even if you are a success, having taken that route, you may not measure up to the internal measures of your success.
That is why a SUCCESS has to have enough and optimal pain and struggle to become sweet to you.

The only way a success becomes sweet is, how many failures have you faced, before you became a success.
The more the failures you have towards your success, the sweeter the success becomes.

Sometimes, we become successful and then do not stay there all the time.
For example, you are on the Forbes list, and you are replaced by another person.
That is a "WINCING" moment that you have to deal with for the rest of your life.

There are three kinds of fears for everyone, who will eventually be a success.
One. I will not be successful.
Two, I will be a success but that will not be enough.
Three, I will be a success but I have to sell my soul for getting to that success.
(This is where the importance of your internal measures of success become a lot more important and critical for pursuing your success).

A little more on that success.
Success is getting what you want.
Happy is wanting what you get.Now you have the recipe for a happy success.
So, only want things that will give you happiness, and make your success bountiful.

That is the reason an older person should advise all the youngsters to get married to a happy person.
If not, the probability of that person's success will be unhappy is HIGH.
So, include that marriage to a happy person as one of the key ingredients to your success recipe.
More so, to deal with those three fears of being successful.

Let's look at two bad pieces of advice and one good advice to your pursuit of success.

Bad One, follow your passion.
A oft said and a really bad one.
Follow your passion only if it manifests two things - your happiness and economic value of supporting your standards of your happy life.
If both of these are not met while following your passion, you are in the wrong game, and highly probable that you are not in the right league.

Bad Two, be a perfect person.
Duh!
Nothing in this world needs perfection.
In fact, the amount of effort required to be perfect at doing a thing is a waste of your TIST in comparison to the incremental WOW you can be when you are doing just OK.
(This sentence is a fully loaded one. Hope to get your head around it.)

Three, throw yourself at helping others.
This is the golden nugget. Remember this is good one.
When you have no idea what you want, or what you are getting, throw yourself at helping others, in the way they like to be helped.
When you have no idea on 'what are your internal reasons' and 'the other's external reasons of success', just spend your TIST in helping others to do and to live their lives a little better.
As you follow this advice, you will realize that you are going and growing.
And eventually, you will know your reasons for 'being at it'.
Aha!
You are on your own UNIQUE path of success.
If I may say, you are on your own path of excellence.
Why?
You will be satisfied.
You will feel good about yourself and your life.
You will have a group of people who respect you, be compassionate with you, and finally, (and mostly) they love you.
You will belong to a community where you are SOMEONE to somebody, if not to everybody.
Even after all this, you will always be HERE and NOW (that eternal NOW) in all your dealings.
You will not put off things to be done.

A measure of success in one's life can be measured by

• the number of regrets you have in life,
• the amount of time you spend whining and wincing about those regrets and
• the degree of angst and frustration you go through because of those regrets.

So, how do you avoid regrets?
If you have given your genuine and honest TIST an opportunity, and you have persisted with it sufficiently, even if the outcomes are not positive or happy or both, it will not be a regret.
(Read that sentence again, just to internalize it!).

Regrets come when you kid yourself to the opportunity.
Regrets come when you are too cool to what is to be done.
Regrets come when you slacked when you shouldn't.
So, get busy manifesting your success.
Your UNIQUE Success.
Why?
Because you will have a positive impact on people who care about you.

Let me deal with that LEGACY aspect in context to being a success.

Is Karl Marx a success?
Let's answer it.
He was not known during his lifetime.
He was abusive to his family.
He was a drunkard, just like many unhappy people are.
But he left a significance on others, post his time.
And nobody knew that 'positive significance' he will have in the future.

And it will be interesting to know what you think about Karl Marx now?

My take is, Karl Marx was not happy in his lifetime.
Therefore, he was not successful.
But he left a great legacy to the world.
And the point here is that, you don't decide what legacy you will leave to the world, but others decide if what you left for the world is a legacy to the world.
That is where the chips favored Karl Marx being a success in the world, post his lifetime.

Since the legacy that you can leave to the world is not in your hands, concentrate on being happy.
When you are happy, you are here and now.
When you are happy, you are focused on yourself, in a selfish way.
When you are happy, you want to share that happiness with others, genuinely.
When you are happy, you become a catalyst for others happiness.

Let's be happy, Captain!
Who knows, we may end up building a successful life.
Let's be at it!