TO BE A SUCCESS YOU'VE GOT TO JUST LET GO!

If you want to achieve effortless happiness and success, you’re going to have to let go.  You’re going to have to let go of your normal ideas of success, you’re going to have to let go of your attachments to the things that you want that, only when you get them will you feel successful.   Above all, you’re going to have to let go of who you think you are.

Our normal minds are full of preconceived notions about who we are and what it takes to be unconditionally successful.   First of all, we are not who we think we are.  I’ve heard many people say that they love their personality.  But your personality is no more than an accumulation of snapshot perceptions that you picked up during your formative years.  As children, we all learned, through the faculty of snapshot learning, the generally held norms of how the world works and our place in it.  We’ve learned ideas that confound our in-built ability to be unconditionally successful – from the myth that you need to better yourself through education (sure, you need a firm educational foundation, but it won’t make you a better person) to the myth that you have to work hard to be a success.  Success comes to those who have a mind to achieve it, not through hard work.

The normal person sees themselves as flawed.   This is based on no more than the snapshots that we took of people and events that made us feel good or bad about ourselves during our formative years, things or events that impressed us enough to make an impression upon our subconscious mind.  People tell me that they will be successful when they overcome their inadequacies (you think that you know what yours are) but our inadequacies our mere perceptions based on our snapshots.   They’re not even our own perceptions but the result of what other people thought of us, said to us, did to us or for us during those years in which our minds were so open that we lapped up these ideas and took them to heart.

You are not who you think you are – you have the inbuilt ability to do anything to which you can set your mind.  But you need to be extra-careful as to what you set your mind to.   Because the normal definitions of success, to which we all, as normal people, adhere, are competitive and comparative.  We measure success in terms of not who we are but what we have.  The old saying “what doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul” should be uppermost in our minds when we turn our thoughts towards defining success because normal definitions of success ruin people’s lives – from the bankers who sold their soul for a quick buck to the ordinary worker or pensioner who is suffering the consequences of such definitions of success.  And I would suggest that nothing has changed as a result of the economic turmoil that the world has encountered over the last couple of years, as bankers begin again to make large profits and pay themselves, in the words of President Obama, “obscene bonuses”.   Indeed, if anything, history shows us that we keep repeating the same mistakes, otherwise the first wars, some 7,500 years ago, would have been the last wars, the Great Depression of 1929 would have been the only economic depression.

What we have to learn is that success and happiness are to be found within.  Where else would you expect to find happiness?   That self-evident truth leads us to a different definition of success, one that does not depend on material wealth but one that does not exclude it either.   Our definitions of success need to be stripped bare of “I must have this to be a success” or “I will not be a success until I have achieved that”.  Success is about being at peace with oneself, wanting for nothing and being able to liberate others from the normal damaged definitions of success as we go through life.  Success is about being extra-ordinarily good at what we do, whether that is herding goats or winning the Super Bowl.  It is about being well rewarded for what we do, whether that is being paid a first-class salary for a big job or the thanks of a grateful soul for a kindness done.  Success is about having great relationships and friends and about spending lots of time doing the things that really turn us on – whether that is playing more golf or spending more time with our children and loved ones.  Above all, success is about achieving all these things at no one else’s expense or, even better, whilst helping those whose lives we touch being successful too.

You’ve got to detach yourself from “I must have this” or “I want that” – because, in giving things the power to make us happy, we similarly give these things the power to make us unhappy.  We need to want nothing but prefer to have it all – whatever “it all” means for you.   So, tonight, in a quiet moment, consider what is really of uppermost importance in your life, consider how the loss of a loved one might alter your perceptions of success.  Consider what, if you yourself were to die to tonight, you might regret having not achieved.  It is in the true priorities of life well lived that we find the real definitions of success.

STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS!

As I write these words, France is gripped in a struggle between a Government that knows for sure that the country simply can no longer afford to give workers the choice to retire at 60 and unions who are, to quote some of the foreign press, fighting for the French way of life.  A classic stand-off between normal people none of whom are being honest.

First of all, the President couldn’t sell a life-raft to a drowning man such is his ‘standing’ with the populace at large.  A man who has made lots of noise on the international stage, he has repeatedly failed to deliver at home – no wonder he has started muttering about not wanting to run for a second term – he’s obviously thinking about getting his retaliation in first.

Enough of politics, what of what the unions are really fighting for?  Perhaps they’re fighting for the truck driver who has been widely quoted over the last few days – “I’m 50 years old, I’ve been working since I was 17 and I’m completely fed up!”  Whoa – I’m 52, I’ve been working since I was 17 and I’m loving it.  People need to get a life!

Perhaps they are fighting for the pension rights of one of our close neighbours – the guy is 57, after doing some seasonal work to ensure that he continued to get his social security payout, he took a job which made him redundant last year.  Having bought himself a hot-tub and a new 4x4, he told me “I’ve simply no intention of looking for work – the State is paying me, it’s paying my wife, it’s paying for my daughter who has left her husband and come back home from Greece because the social security is better here – and I’ll get my pension when I’m sixty” – he didn’t seem to realise that it’s my taxes that keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed.

To the outsider, the French way of life is all about long lunches, longer dinners, flowing conversation and wine.  So it is and so it should be – many people can learn from French custom.  But that’s got nothing to do with a train driver or power worker who can retire in their early fifties simply because Second World War legislation (to reward people in high pressure jobs) has never been changed.

VISUALIZING SUCCESS