Do you want to be successful in life? Most likely your answer is yes. But first you need to figure out what success means to you personally.
Success, in the sense in which the word sounds today, is a child of relatively recent times. Once upon a time – (and the farther back in time, even more so) – it was an assessment of the fulfillment by a person of the role and the work that was assigned to him by the structure of society. And no steps for you to the right or left of the prescribed route of life: the hunter – hunt, the sower – this, the keeper of the fire – keep the fire, and the firewood harvester – a march for firewood. An ant is successful exactly to the extent that he serves the anthill, without striving for success and without thinking about whether he is successful.
But time passed, and success became more and more a characteristic of an individual in comparison with others. Were the small office hamster Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin successful at Gogol’s, finally building his longed-for new overcoat? In the eyes of other hamsters of the same kind, who continue to freeze in old overcoats worn to the limit, definitely yes. In the eyes of the big head hamster, definitely not. And the big hamster head was just fie in comparison with the director of the department, and he – in comparison with the minister … However, the king of beasts can turn out to be just a hamster in front of some hamster. Is Grigory Perelman successful, who solved the Poincaré problem and entered the list of a hundred living geniuses, huddled with his mother in a shabby apartment and refused a million dollar prize? Will he hear a disdainfully surprised: “If you are so smart, then why are you so poor?”. Is a woman successfully celebrating a silver wedding in a hut paradise? Who is more successful: a girl who is brought to the institute by a driver in her father’s Rolls-Royce, or her professor, a world-famous scientist and a mocking salary of 14 thousand rubles? With whom to make life?
Today, a successful person is unthinkable outside the freedom of his own choice in what and how to be successful. He is not obliged to follow in the footsteps of his fathers, to meet class requirements, to overcome social barriers. He has the right to choose, but also the responsibility of choosing; an almost limitless field of choice, but also a huge number of temptations associated primarily with aggressive advertising of success.
Thousands of books and magazines, radio, TV and all and sundry on the Internet paint the image of a successful person as having solid money and gadgets according to the latest fashion, fame, power, whose name is “on everyone’s lips”. He is always in a good mood and self-confident, he has no problems, but when they appear, he clicks them like seeds. All sorts of textbooks of success like “1001 ways … How to become … in three weeks” and miracle workers with their spells-love spells are at least a dime a dozen. Learn “Crex-fex-mex”, and everything will be fine with you – both the face, and the figure, and the clothes, and the wallet, and the car, and the villa on the Mediterranean Sea. Well, the soul and thoughts are lyrics, not up to it, it is necessary to forge success! “To be successful” becomes a slogan for which all means are good to implement.
But why do I so often see disappointed, tired people among those who are successful in all these eye-catching signs, spinning like squirrels in the wheel of their success, with all the possibilities to be healthy, breaking into psychosomatic disorders, balancing on the verge of alcoholism?
They put on success as happiness, but there is no happiness – all the forces are spent on maintaining success. The road to it lies away from what they love and what they would like to do. “The table is set, I am dressed up, a mountain of beautiful toys for the Christmas tree, the guests are about to come, but there is no Christmas tree”, … “Nobody needs it as it is. I’m torn, I’m stretching, I’m trying to achieve something, but it’s funny, strange. And if you don’t do this, then it’s empty, ”the patients say.
Looking back at life, sooner or later you begin to distinguish between success and its clothes. They are needed, and it’s good when they are beautiful and comfortable, but success is good in any, and you meet it by going your own way through life, and not chasing after it like a stupid roaches for a shiny empty hook.