I don’t know that I can, or would, call myself a success at this moment in my life. Most days, I am ok with that, because my life is not over yet. What I do know is this. I cannot, and will not, call myself a failure. When I think about the steps I’ve taken in my life, I frequently remind myself of one of Thomas Edison’s most famous quotes:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
If you adopt this attitude, you only fail when you stop moving forward. There is another very important reason why I know I haven’t failed. Irregardless of where I may or may not have taken some missteps, what I have accomplished or not accomplished so far has been on my own terms, for my own self. For the most part, I have never set out to please the people around me. There were definitely times I got momentarily lost in that pursuit, and they were some of the worst times of my life.
Most of the big things I have done, have been done because I felt a deep, driven need to do them. Oftentimes I heard from people around me that what I wanted wasn’t possible, or I wasn’t good enough to achieve what I set out to achieve. I heard, a lot, that no one understood my dream or my methods.
“There’s no key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.”
– Ed Sheeran
Maybe my success hasn’t happened yet, but I can call my learning process and my ability to look inside myself and find the strength to keep moving onward a successful pursuit. I will reach something that feels and looks like success to myself one day, in whatever time is right and achievable. When I do, I can authentically say that I did it without trying to please everyone, and I can be proud of that. Even if it doesn’t look like success to anyone else.
Your Life is Not a Journey, Its a Staircase
Everyone starts at the bottom. It is your choice whether you choose to spend your time climbing each stair as it sits in front of you, or whether you spend your time looking for someone to roll out a red carpet for you so the stairs look like something everyone else is envious of you climbing.
Maybe my success hasn’t happened yet, but I can call my ability to look inside myself and find the strength to keep moving upward a successful pursuit.
At this moment, I am about halfway up that proverbial staircase, and I’ve been on the same stair for a while now. I can’t say I’ve reached a plateau, but neither can I say I’ve hit a slump. Rather, I like to think I am taking a moment to breathe before tackling the rest of the staircase. I’m claiming this moment for myself as well. Why? Because the key to happiness is understanding who you are. Its being able to look inside yourself, and do what needs doing because you are the one who needs it done. Not because someone else is telling you they’ll like you if you accomplish it.
Looking outside yourself for accolades or acknowledgement is very dangerous. It can be an indicator of professional success, or a way to momentarily give your life some false meaning. If you allow that kind of outside reassurance to dictate how or why you make decisions and actions, you will find that it snowballs. Sooner or later you will stop recognizing yourself, and you’ll find that you are getting lost in pleasing others. This is a horrible place to be, because you can never succeed at pleasing others. Its not possible for one person to be in charge of another person’s happiness. When you try to take it upon yourself to make others like you, not only will you NOT find success, you will lose yourself.
Learn to Follow Your Own Roadmap
There’s a takeaway in this for everyone. Regardless of where you have been and who you have been trying to please, its never too late to take control of your own happiness.
Its not possible for one person to be in charge of another person’s happiness.
Its possible I was helped in the development of this very useful skill by being wildly unpopular during a pretty formative social development stage. Middle school and early high school were tough years. I was academically accomplished, and musically and artistically creative, traits which already set me apart in a tiny town. Then I started daring to dress much differently than the majority of my peers. On top of all that, I made a decision early on only to date outside of my 50 person high school and that clinched the deal. I was fantastically uncool. I spent some time being depressed about this, but then I realized I’d made all these decisions and done all these things because I didn’t want to be defined by the acceptance or lack of acceptance of any group of people, even those that were front and center at that stage in my life.
This strategy didn’t get me terribly far in the years-long popularity contest that is high-school. But it has been by far one of my greatest skills as an adult. I learned to go inside myself, and analyze the reasons I was doing X, Y, or Z. Sometimes you do need to do X’s and Y’s even if you don’t want to. There are things about being a functioning adult that require you to listen to your Ego, and ignore your Id. But outside of basic societal functionality, happy people learn never to put themselves in a position where they are doing something purely for the approval of others.
That is the skill you need to develop. Learn it. Internalize it. You will never please others on a level that makes you feel good. Each accolade and each level of someone else’s approval just begets more hunger for more approval. Or, worse, a complete emotional meltdown if you receive their disapproval. The only way you’ll ever claim your happiness and find your success is by aiming to please yourself.
XOXO,
