Mindset
What has been your cost of success?
I often ask this question to guests on Leave Your Mark. At what cost has the success you’ve had professionally or personally come?
Most of the time, people answer that they’ve compromised relationships or their health.
Fascinating.
For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, “what is the key to a good life?”
They followed men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.
After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates. The study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group.
It is the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it brought the researchers to a simple and profound conclusion:
Good relationships lead to health and happiness.
The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.
So here we are compromising relationships AND our health to be successful!!!
So many people say this, and in some ways quite cavalierly, like it’s a reasonable cost associated with being good or great at something, or having success as our sociological influences would describe it.
Having things, doing things, being things that people look up to or admire. That is success in the mind’s eye.
And yet, near the end of life, the lament is always, I should have spent more time with my family, I wish I’d taken better care of myself.
I guess there are three questions worth answering here:
1 – Is Success actually about acquiring things, achieving things, or being something or someone others admire or wish to emulate?
2 – Can you have success as described above without compromising your health or relationships?
3 – If you can’t, is there another way to describe or define success?
That’s the key really, what are you using as your compass leading towards success? What is a complete expression of this truth, not sociologically misguided aspirations.
Aspiring to do things, accomplish things, or create things is absolutely the essence of being human. But the argument about who is successful does not rest in the end point, or completion of the objective, it rests in the effort and intent to actualize it.
Can you bring quality effort, and intention, yet still reserve some of yourself for the actualizing of love, kindness and contribution for those who mean everything to you?
Does being a good father or mother mean you can’t be a good pilot, or doctor, or construction worker?
Are you successful if you are a good construction worker, teacher, or parent?
Does one leave one’s mark in that which gets noticed and celebrated, or is a mark left when the contribution remains unknown, or simply understood by the few rather than the many?
The fact that something we achieve or do becomes recognized should be an incidental outcome, not a focus of identity or achievement.
Do it because you love it. Be with them because you love them. Be where your feet are, be present, be connected, and always do your best.
Words to live by.
In such effort can most certainly reside the actualization of a dream living in the presence of friendship and love.
