Quality of Life

“The more tran­quil a man becomes, the greater is his suc­cess, his influ­ence, his power for good. Calm­ness of mind is one of the beau­ti­ful jew­els of wis­dom.“
– James Allen (1864–1912)

This par­a­digm shift in time man­age­ment has led me to the under­stand­ing that goals by them­selves are sim­ply no good. If you ask me, they’re all a bunch of caca. The con­cept of goal achieve­ment today is so clouded in mis­con­cep­tion and uses up so much mis­guided energy that it lit­er­ally takes peo­ple away from their true success.

If you focus on the future or dwell on the past, you can become dis­tracted from what’s gen­uinely impor­tant in your life right now. Most goals are set because peo­ple have cer­tain needs or wants. How­ever, once those lacks have been filled, more often than not oth­ers were cre­ated or over­looked in the process.

Real­ize that it’s not the goal you really want but the feel­ing that comes with its achieve­ment. It is the essence of the goal and not the object. For instance, if you want a $100,000, isn’t it because you value free­dom, whether it’s the free­dom of fol­low­ing your dreams or the free­dom from debt? If it’s becom­ing vice-​​president of a large firm, is it because you value recog­ni­tion, respect, or lead­er­ship, and not the posi­tion in and of itself?

Con­versely, it’s not lack that cre­ates anguish but the feel­ing of lack. This is why so many peo­ple achieve goals and won­der why they’re still not happy. So, a goal should not be looked upon as a way to fill a need but a as way to help you design the course you can take to enjoy — and give a mean­ing to — life.

For exam­ple, if you set out to achieve goals, are you only going to feel ful­filled after you’ve reached it? Do you, for exam­ple, work five days a week in order to enjoy the remain­ing two? Do you work with retire­ment in mind and dread — or, worse yet, waste — those remain­ing years just because of that one goal? Do you say, “Once I get these mis­er­able years behind me I can start enjoy­ing what’s left”? Ugh! That’s worse than hav­ing no goals at all.

Today, I see too many peo­ple who “work for a liv­ing” or for some future goal (such as retire­ment) and waste their lives in the mean­time as a result. In the case of retire­ment, for instance, I ask myself why do peo­ple work two-​​thirds of their lives just so they can enjoy the remain­ing one-​​third — when that remain­ing one-​​third is guar­an­teed to no one!

As Lao Tse, the Chi­nese prophet, once said, “Many climb the lad­der of suc­cess only to find out at the top that it was lean­ing against the wrong wall.” If you believe that your goals will bring you hap­pi­ness and ful­fill­ment, your suc­cess will always be a step ahead of you.

You are but run­ning a race against time, a race in which you’ll always end up los­ing in some way or another. In other words, true suc­cess hinges on how you feel about what you do right now at this very moment and not after you’ve “climbed the ladder.”

Are you lov­ing what you do or doing what you love? If not, then you know that even if you man­aged your time effec­tively, even if you achieved many of your goals, you would never really accom­plish much or feel that you have (let alone be happy with the result).

The truth is sim­ple. Suc­cess with­out hap­pi­ness is fail­ure. Ful­fill­ment and a sense of ful­fill­ment are dif­fer­ent. The more valu­able the essence of what you seek is to you per­son­ally, the more value — or sense of ful­fill­ment — you will auto­mat­i­cally get from the jour­ney. One is directly pro­por­tional to the other.

Reg­gie Leach said it this way, “Suc­cess is not the result of spon­ta­neous com­bus­tion; you must set your­self on fire.” In other words, you are suc­cess­ful because of your hap­pi­ness and not the other way around. Do what you love and enjoy the things that really mat­ter. If not, you might not live long enough to get — let alone enjoy — that which you so des­per­ately seek.

About the Author

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