When we look around us, we see a lot of people and businesses that we deem successful. We do this because we have acquired a metric that measures the level of success according to a certain belief. In the world of business, this is typically the “profit and growth” rate.
When someone makes a decent return, or their organization grows at a rate that is above average, we think they deserve the badge of success. The current beliefs that infuse our lives with success-yardsticks are what makes us miserable. As with most irrelevant measurements, they always extend into infinity. According to these measurements: no success is ever enough if we believe that money and market growth are indicators for it.
In nature, there is no concept of absolute growth. There is no belief that a tree needs to give a certain amount of apples or grow at a certain rate per year in order to be a successful tree. Unnatural concepts create unnatural realities. Realities that are born from fear and that create pain.
Think about it, the concept of success and growth was instilled into most of us at a young age at school or by our parents. When the belief that competition against others, and against ourselves, became normalized, we invited in the disastrous idea that “we have to constantly make more for the sake of making more.” If you learn this at a young age, that idea later develops into a full-fledged lifestyle that is celebrated and passed on to others, inflicting pain on humanity.
I would like to state that our teachers and parents did not teach us their definition of success in order to harm us. Not at all. They just passed down what they were taught. Unfortunately, the most common and long-held definition of success is drenched in fear and scarcity. So, it is critical that we break the chain to stop passing this down to others.
Our current and future success definition must be one that is born from love and abundance. In nature, everything thrives on abundance. Nothing starts a new day with fear in its heart. Everything embraces the present moment and applies itself 100% to the present moment.
And that is the greatest success one can find: “The awareness to apply oneself entirely in the present moment.” As business owners and leaders, this means that all we need to do is to create a love-based ecosystem within which we create as much human value as possible.
Since this is our nature, we just need to keep pushing ourselves at doing a better job at providing the world with our magic- our value proposition. Once we are flowing and providing our people and the world with that which we were born to create, we cannot be, orfeel, unsuccessful. And with each day that passes, we become better at creating more value in more efficient ways, our connection to our own self grows, and with it, our natural idea of success.
The beauty of such a success definition is that it is completely disconnected from outside factors. We have control over it, because we choose to create our own success.
If we keep believing that success is an amalgamation of transactional metrics as they relate to the current market climate, we will keep bouncing around in the eternal tides of greed. We will willfully enslave ourselves to whatever the current metric trend or latest fashion is.
We will feel broken when we don’t hit that number, and we feel encouraged when we get to drive a car that symbolizes the current standard of success. This is fleeting and futile. Success is not like this. Success stays. Success is innate, natural and connected with the self, not the greed of man.
Make it your duty to foster success, on your own terms, by measuring it based on how much you apply your true self in the service of others. Happiness and fulfillment will follow automatically.
