Success is a key concept in our world. It’s a key concept in our life, to be more precise. It’s the measure of all our actions, attitudes and thoughts. Each and every second in our life is dedicated to success, in one of its forms: from having a succesful relationship, to obtaining a success in a business contract, or to finish a personal task exactly as planned. Everything we do is planned with a positive scenario in mind, meaning we always intend to do only the best for us. And success is the most important fuel for our future actions: if we do have a high quality fuel, we will tend to have more and more successful actions. If our fuel decrease in quality, we will act in a more and more confused an ineffective way.
But what is early success? Is the retirement at the age of 30, after exploding with a dot com venture? Is the rock star that shined for one year and then sinked in the sea of depression? Is the young CEO that in the last 5 years of his thirties had never had a day of relaxation? And instead he has to manage 24 hours a day a huge multi-national company with more employees that he’ll be able to meet in this life?
Hard to say, huh? Because, at some point, all of the examples above are in the general standards of defining success, right? It’s about fame. It’s about money. It’s about a respected career. These are the most popular key values of the concept of success.
Well, the problem is that the concept of success is, most of time, hijacked. It’s taken by other people, that tends to establish our measure of success or failure using unusual methods. That is the biggest problem with success, generally speaking, and also the only problem with early success.
Early success is, most of the time, the early failure of the personal values. Is the total bancrupcy of your sense of good feeling and joy of life. Is a hijacked period of your life by people that you think you admire and respect. Is the phantom of a “dream life” without any real touch. It’s like a tutorial for a software that doesn’t really exist.
Why am I so “against” early success? Well, I’m not against early success. I’m against the standard way of the “success advertising policy”. I’m against the constant reduction of success to only 3 key values: fame, money, career. It’s nothing wrong with those, they are perfectly fit there, but if they are the only values of the success, well, then we have a problem.
You can’t really achieve very fast those fame, money and career values, unless you are ready to pay a price. You really can’t, because the energy spent for those fast achievements must be extracted from somewhere, must pe paid somehow. And that is the price of your personal values, that you’ll have to shuffle in order to agree with only those 3 things. And that is also the price of your consciousness, which will lower to the level that will allow you to become a lean and mean machine for making fame, money and career.
It’s not hard to do all those 3 things. It’s really easy, by the way. But the way you do them is crucial. To be honest, for me success is not were you end up, but what you do along the way. It’s a popular saying, but a very unpopular attitude.
You can achieve fame. But what that fame will be about? You can be a famous pop star, known only for his parties? Well, it’s nice to be remembered as that, but it really does get boring at some point. You can achieve money. But what are the values that you inject into society, in order for the society to get back to you with a lot of money? That is the real question, because you can extract money from the society without giving back, in a miriad of forms, but, sooner or later, the balance will have to be reestablished somehow. You can have a career. But what precisely will carry on that career? Which values? It’s a robotical management attitude? A ruthless comedian career? An “honest” politican?
Digg deeper into this type of questions and you’ll have soon a very different perspective on the early success definition.
I am not saying that every early success has to be blamed. If that early success involves other values too, other values than the 3 mentioned above, well, we have a winner. But if the early success will involve only the 3 key components, that is a failure.
Having financial abundance is ok. Having a well known name is also ok. And being respected, well, is also a good thing. But please think at what you do to achieve that. If you do only what you truly believe in, regardless of the financial measure of the outcome, in a strange and unpredictable way, the financial abundance will come. If you do for others exactly as you would like they to do for you, by a magical touch, you’ll see how respect is all over their faces. And if you just advertise your true self, and not popular or hype values, all the people will remember your name.
Early success is true succes only if it has your true self within. Only if you embraced your biggest challenge, overcomed your biggest obstacle, and did it in a fast and clean way, you will enjoy your true measure of life.
[tags]success, personal development, positive thinking[/tags]
A nice read. And I can see the time is changing, more and more people are taking the highway than fitting in the sideways.
is starting your financial future at 40 yrs too late or do u have a idea.for late doers
I know cases of people who started their own business at 45 and did very well. My father is in this league, for instance 🙂
So, go for it!