There are a lot of articles around about success and what it is, what it means. I think that "Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder". The point I am trying to make is that everyone has different ideas about what the word means but I'm not here to suggest that I know any differently or better but that I, like everyone else, have an opinion.
It seems that success and wealth have almost become synonymous in today's material based world even though the words mean totally different things. An angler who catches 6 fish may well consider himself very successful but would it make him wealthy? That's not such a simple question as it may first seem because the successful fisherman may well feel that his life is extremely rich at that time, he possibly wants nothing more out of life, at that time, than those 6 fish and the pleasure he experienced whilst catching them.
This must pose the question: What is wealth? I guess that most people asked this would immediately, without thinking about it, give "a lot of money" as the answer. They would say this, without thought, because that is what they have been taught since they were tiny and they will, in many cases never have even thought about challenging this belief. And why should they, they were also taught that you don't challenge beliefs!
I have read in many spiritual and self-improvement books that wealth, or richness is not really anything to do with what you have but much more to do with being happy with what you do have. Happiness is another word that, it seems to me, has an almost private and personal meaning to each person as what makes one person happy could well do the opposite for someone else.
Back to the Angler for a moment who is never happier than when he's sat on the river bank or wherever fishing for hour after hour. Other people may not understand this at all and would never even dream of trying it. Just one more point about the happy and successful fisherman, and a very strange point it may seem were you to think about it; That fisherman could sit there, on the river bank for 10 hours, not catch a single fish but, probably, still go home feeling happy and that his day had been successful!
So, back to success: The world, the modern world that is, tells us that success is all about achievement of one sort or another, achieving wealth, recognition, respect or about meeting goals that you either set yourself or society, other people that is, set for you. It's all about winning, about becoming better than everyone else.
"Becoming" is a key word, I feel, as we all tend to work towards becoming successful sometime in the future, even if the goal we are striving to meet is to be reached just after lunch, it's always in the future. Then, of course, having reached one goal we or society immediately set us another so any success we may have "achieved" is all but wiped out by the striving, working towards or searching for the next little bit of success, the next goal, the next sports car the next million or whatever it might be. We are always going to become successful but most of us know that tomorrow never comes. Does merely owning a sports car or having a million in the bank mean that you are successful? If it does what do you do next? Get MORE, the disease of the ego!
Does owning a successful business mean that we are successful? What might we have done to achieve that success? Have we been dishonest and deceitful, have we trampled over other human beings to get there? Have we ruined relationships and made enemies of friends? Have we filled the world with negative, toxic energy? What are the real consequences of this success?
We can stop all that by BEING successful rather than striving to BECOME successful. So, can we be successful and experience success NOW or must it be in the future? Do we have to wait 3 months, a year or 10 years before we can BE successful? The point is that we can only be successful now, in this present moment, even if we have to wait 10 years it will always happen in the now.
So it seems to me that rather than wait for something, usually something materialistic to happen before I can consider myself a success it would be wonderful if I could be successful now and I believe that I can do that very simply (that doesn't mean easily!) by just being who I am now and from there put as much quality as I can into this moment and whatever I am doing in it. I need do nothing more than live this moment the best way I possibly can to be successful. I can never do anymore than my best so how could doing it possibly be anything less than successful.
I'm not suggesting that we don't try to better our material standing, that we don't try to become millionaires if that's what we want to do but it's such a shame than the majority of us humans need to achieve something to feel successful.
Every day in which I don't hurt anybody or anything (except mosquitoes!!), I am a success. Every time I think a kind thought, I am a success. Every time I recognise that I'm in the wrong and apologise, I'm a success. Whenever I can see myself for what I am, a human being with all the potential and the failings of every other human being, and accept that totally, then I am a success. I can be a success now whenever I make the decision to be so!
I am sure that a lot of you reading this article will have watched or read "The Secret" and maybe got a bit carried away with it as I did. Then maybe you found that it doesn't seem to work very well or at all. The problem is that The Secret only tells a tiny part of the story and if you think about it it is very unlikely that The Law of Attraction is a standalone law, there must be more and like any set of laws they are very tightly tied together.
If you would like to know more you can discover all the Laws Not Revealed in "the Secret" here! http://thesecretlawsofattraction.org
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