Success By Perspective

SUCCESS BY PERSPECTIVEnBy
William Cottringer, Ph.D.

Success—What you get from doing what you do to get it; acquiring any or all of the following: Having an abundance of health, wealth, power, influence, friends and wisdom; gaining a sense of satisfaction from achieving your goals, being authentically happy, doing what matters and making a difference in the world by serving others generously and unselfishly, reaching recognized status in your profession, being enlightened spiritually, having genuine peace of mind or leaving a noble legacy for others to admire.

Perspective—Your personal viewpoint of something; the particular vantage point in time and place where you are seeing your private version of the truth or reality; very inter-related to what you see; your opinion as to how correct and complete your perception and interpretation of something is and how you feel about that.

The common denominator to success is having the right perspective—seeing all the relevant aspects of something in a way that gets you the results you want and showing you clearly what you need to do to get those results. Having the right perspective is not an easy thing or everyone would have one and be equally successful. Here is why getting the right perspective is not easy.

1. Usually the best perspective is one which is based on a 360-degree view of something, made up of correct and complete information. A ‘whole’ perspective is usually the best one; and having one requires much time and creativity in reconciling the many opposite halves of a thing before you begin to see the opposite things as really two sides of the same coin, like success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, and peace and turmoil. Some of these pairs we get to experience both sides of quickly and frequently, but others—like life and death—are beyond our present comprehension and experiences.

Take our two party political system in the U.S. for example, which often results in serious conflicts about important issues like fiscal responsibility vs. social welfare programs, or freedom vs. equality. Such divergent problems are not resolvable, only manageable and that takes a lot of understanding to realize. Plus our dualistic thinking—dividing the world into this or that, with one side being okay and the other not okay—can make artificial extremes with such polar opposites almost impervious to reconciliation.

2. We all have a main ‘absolute’ perspective of life which is made up of a lot of littler, relative perspectives of things. If we have the wrong perspective—one which is incorrect or incomplete—it takes a lot of time and effort in unthinking all these littler perspectives that make up a big one and replacing them one by one. Take the perspective of being optimistic or pessimistic about life and the things that happen to us. A pessimistic perspective is made up of many years of experience that verify that way of seeing life and undoing and replacing those experiences with a different flavor isn’t easy to accomplish.

3. One right perspective—that success is born out of failure—is a hard one to see even when it is happening—given our ever-growing tradition of instant nanosecond need gratification and impatience with delay. And then we end up not appreciating the available lessons from failures and the small gains they can contribute to the road to success. Quitting is the norm, especially the closer you move to getting around the next corner where success awaits.

4. A huge right perspective is to agree with the idea of Success by Perspective. This perspective is extremely important because it is the only thing that can help close the success gap between where you are and where you want to be. But the more you don’t buy into the real potential for success being available to everyone, the harder it is to let go to the idea. You are stuck on a high dive indefinitely, not wanting to dive or climb down. Such stuckness can become addictive. Fortunately though, what you resist persists and even a frozen perspective thaws eventually, but it doesn’t happen ove
ight.

5. Another important perspective that takes time to see is the very perspective of time itself. You can see time as either being under the traditional or unconventional ‘definition’—the mechanical, sequential measurement or the fluid ete
ity of the now moment. Which perspective you have, has a lot to do with how much or how little time you seem to have and how much or how little you get done. And good time management is an essential ingredient of any successful success formula.

6. The right perspective of success is also important. Long term, enduring success requires applying a formula which includes thinking and activities beyond just having the right perspective alone. Such a success formula includes allowing yourself to have big dreams and not giving up on them despite adversity; translating these dreams into attainable goals; keeping these goals in sharp focus; being creative in applying your talents to achieve these goals better than the competition; working hard, staying motivated and being tenacious in doing what it takes to win without giving up when that would be easier; and sharing your success secrets with others.

The odd thing about Success by Perspective is that at any given moment you can choose to embrace the right perspective and change things drastically. That choice is always yours each new moment. Of course that might involve giving up the false sense of security that your other perspective is giving you. A useful clue here is that there is always a reward involved to keep something going, even in the wrong direction. nn nn