One of your most important needs is to always want to make your life better. That feeling you get when you know you're getting better every day is a part of who you are. It is very satisfying to know that you are changing and making your environment better through your own actions. It is an important part of living a happy, full life. At some level, we all want to be successful in some way. We are always looking for ways to have more, be more, and gain more. We think that once we "have it all," we will be happy and life will be perfect. Then we can just take it easy and enjoy life.
This way of thinking, this mindset, can "kill" you like a virus. Psychically or spiritually, if not emotionally. There are a lot of examples in modern culture of successful people who seem to have everything, but are actually very unhappy and have to fight all the time with their own problems. They don't understand what success is all about. The word "success" comes from the Latin word for "to advance" or "to progress." This means that success is not a thing you get at the end, but a process that has very little to do with the end result. From this point of view, success is what will make your life better because it will lead you to better things.
Most people lose sight of the real reason they want to be successful in the first place as they try to improve their quality of life. It's never the things themselves, but how you think they'll make you feel once you have them. Your success will either be reachable or last for a long time. Most of your dreams will come true during your life, but that doesn't mean you'll be happy and satisfied. When you try to get more and more "things," you won't be very happy because you'll always be depending on something outside of you to give you the feelings you want to feel inside, feelings you think will come from getting what you want.
The real point of a goal is never to get something of material value. Instead, the goal is to help you grow as a person as you work toward it. For you to have success that lasts, you need to change the way you think. Instead of focusing on what you have to do to get what you want, you should think about what you have to become to attract what you want. You get to keep what you become. When you change your focus to building your character, you can start to see goals and success as a way to get where you want to go instead of the end goal itself. You start to separate yourself from the idea that you need "stuff" to feel happy and complete.
It's not enough to know that you can do well. You want to know what it's like to do well. You have that feeling of success as a part of who you are as a person, as a part of your character. When success is easy to get, when you can get the things you want, the feeling of success doesn't last very long. The experience is not the same every time. So often, we hear about young people who have amazing success stories and reach all their goals in a short amount of time, only to break down emotionally soon after. They haven't learned that the key to long-term success is being able to create success in your life that can last. Success that lasts is never-ending. It stays the same and looks after itself. With the skills and traits you picked up while working toward your goal, you can re-create any success because you are the source.
The Goose and the Golden Egg, a story by Aesop, shows best how success can be achieved and kept up over time. The goose, which was the source of the gold, could always make gold, but the farmer, who was impatient and didn't know much, wanted all of it right away. So, he cut the goose open, only to find that it was empty. The moral of the story is that you need to care for and improve yourself to keep being happy and successful. If you only care about reaching your goals, you won't get any more "golden eggs," because what really matters is who you become and how that makes you feel.
Either you can get success or you can be it. The goal is the same, but the way people think about it is very different. You can either get the "things" that will make you feel successful, or you can become the source of your own success and happiness. You want results that last, and the only way to get them is to be able to create and re-create what you want to experience during your time on earth whenever you want. To think in a way that leads to long-term success and sustainability, you must first realise that real success comes from giving, not from getting. What you give away is what you get to experience, and what you experience is what you get to keep for the rest of your life. In the end, to keep something going, you have to give and take, because that's how growth and life work. Success is a feeling, and if you make that feeling a part of who you are, you'll never be without it and you won't want anything else.
Let go of your need to get "stuff" and focus on your life experiences and how they make you feel. You can get better by setting goals that will make you into the kind of person who makes what you want most happen. What you get will go away and lose its value in the long run. What you keep alive will grow and get bigger, and it will keep making your life better and better. Success is static, and just like everything else in nature, it will die if it doesn't change or grow.
