How to be (more) successful? What a question…? It can be so simple.

Last week, from a colleague who is living in China, I got a Facebook message with a recommendation to read an article with the name: “Nine Things You Need To Stop Doing If You Want To Be Successful.” After reading the article, with a smile, I made the comment to her: “A lot of stopping. I miss: Start Living.”

The word successful took my mind for a while. What is being successful, and in relation to this message, why do I have to stop doing things to reach it?

For me the word ‘successful’ has some same things as the word ‘beautiful’. You never can find the right description and you cannot touch it. What beautiful is for you, for somebody else can be unnatural, out of style, or even disgusting. Being beautiful has no end. There is always a ´more beautiful´ and, if not, we just create the desire to get it by photo-shopping.

With the word ‘success’ it’s a little bit the same. You always can reach more. There is no end. Thousands of people have the same degree as you. Millions have a higher amount of money on their bank account, a nicer/bigger car, or a bigger or more luxury house. But is this being successful?

Other people laugh about what success is for you. Even when you would win an Olympic medal in gold, within a couple of years somebody else takes over this place. Thinking of reaching/having success always and immediately is an invitation, for yourself or somebody else, to go beyond. In this way you never can reach success and when we feel we reached it, nearly always it is temporary.

Does success really exist or do we just imagine it as a kind of goal and make ourselves a little bit mad with it?

The English version of Wikipedia offers for the word Success; ‘Attainment of higher social status’, ‘The opposite of failure”. Reading this I got the feeling of competition, fight, and sometimes – using other ones backs - things even worse. It can be a kind of reaching the (temporary) first place and showing that you are (temporary) the best.

It’s this competition world in which we grow up. Our system is injected with it. We have to reach goals to be successful. Actually every single person has a goal of unique superiority. Sometimes out of early dissapointments changing in inferiority.
In The Netherlands we have a so called Cito-test to ‘help’ schools, children at the end of the primary school, and their parents, to take the next step in education. When this students, after growing up and having a job for several years, as adults look back and check what really was the impact of this test in their ‘success´ in life a lot of times you find different results. Sometimes even the opposite than expected (Inferiority changed in superiority).

Wanting to be successful helps us to make steps forward, to grow, to discover and that´s great as long as it’s a kind of playful game instead of a struggle or fight to get it. And when we reach our longing goal take a little while to celebrate. Most of the time, even before we get there, a new goal is already longing. A never ending story. Sometimes a vicious circle of running instead of enjoying. So what about this first goal we reached? What did we learn? Did it make us happy and if so, for what period of time? Was it really worth spending a part of our life time on it?

There is another way and perspective to look to being successful as well. It does not need shiny cars, no higher status, a big house, and it is not even necessary to stop with doing nine things. It’s immediately working in a sustainable way. It’s called … GET A LIFE!

Do the things you are passionate about, live your talents and gifts, enjoy the small things in life even more, enjoy life, smile. I am grateful to live in a surrounding on a daily base filled and full of smiles and positive energy.

When my mother should read my story I think she should add the sentence: “Be and feel satisfied and sometimes just sacrifice. Humility is not a bad thing.”

A maybe different and ‘small’ world of success at first sight. At the end it will infect the big world around in a very positive way.

And competition or struggle? For what? What are these words? Just laugh and ‘enrich’ yourself (this is not an egoistic thing) with the success of living. Do not support the row of people who only were running for success and, at the end, got regrets about their already past life time. Let your life be your career, there will be no desire left.

Being successful only is a label the outside world gives you as an temporary ‘award’. A label often filled with underlying envy. A direct call to compete. A call to endlessly try to accomplish others losing sight of the shores of living. There is no way to sustainable reach it. It does not exist unless you are God.

Am I successful? What a question...? I feel, step by step, this word is leaving my vocabulary because I try to be more and more aware of life and enjoy the only goal in it, living. 

You have a choice. Get a life. It’s simple. Success is guaranteed!

Frans Captijn
Host / Catalyst / Talenteer at Captijn Insight

Captijn Insight: “Catalyst in your process to new sustainable flow. Whether you are an individual, couple, team or an organization.” 

www.captijninsight.com

captijninsight@gmail.com