To be a Success – Just Let Go

If you want to achieve effortless happiness and success, you’re going to have to let go. You’re going to have to let go of your normal ideas of success, you’re going to have to let go of your attachments to the things that you want that, only when you get them will you feel successful. Above all, you’re going to have to let go of who you think you are.

Our normal minds are full of preconceived notions about who we are and what it takes to be unconditionally successful. First of all, we are not who we think we are. I’ve heard many people say that they love their personality. But your personality is no more than an accumulation of snapshot perceptions that you picked up during your formative years. As children, we all learned, through the faculty of snapshot learning, the generally held norms of how the world works and our place in it. We’ve learned ideas that confound our in-built ability to be unconditionally successful – from the myth that you need to better yourself through education (sure, you need a firm educational foundation, but it won’t make you a better person) to the myth that you have to work hard to be a success. Success comes to those who have a mind to achieve it, not through hard work.

The normal person sees themselves as flawed. This is based on no more than the snapshots that we took of people and events that made us feel good or bad about ourselves during our formative years, things or events that impressed us enough to make an impression upon our subconscious mind. People tell me that they will be successful when they overcome their inadequacies (you think that you know what yours are) but our inadequacies our mere perceptions based on our snapshots. They’re not even our own perceptions but the result of what other people thought of us, said to us, did to us or for us during those years in which our minds were so open that we lapped up these ideas and took them to heart.

You are not who you think you are – you have the inbuilt ability to do anything to which you can set your mind. But you need to be extra-careful as to what you set your mind to. Because the normal definitions of success, to which we all, as normal people, adhere, are competitive and comparative. We measure success in terms of not who we are but what we have. The old saying “what doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul” should be uppermost in our minds when we turn our thoughts towards defining success because normal definitions of success ruin people’s lives – from the bankers who sold their soul for a quick buck to the ordinary worker or pensioner who is suffering the consequences of such definitions of success. And I would suggest that nothing has changed as a result of the economic turmoil that the world has encountered over the last couple of years, as bankers begin again to make large profits and pay themselves, in the words of President Obama, “obscene bonuses”. Indeed, if anything, history shows us that we keep repeating the same mistakes, otherwise the first wars, some 7,500 years ago, would have been the last wars, the Great Depression of 1929 would have been the only economic depression.

What we have to learn is that success and happiness are to be found within. Where else would you expect to find happiness? That self-evident truth leads us to a different definition of success, one that does not depend on material wealth but one that does not exclude it either. Our definitions of success need to be stripped bare of “I must have this to be a success” or “I will not be a success until I have achieved that”. Success is about being at peace with oneself, wanting for nothing and being able to liberate others from the normal damaged definitions of success as we go through life. Success is about being extra-ordinarily good at what we do, whether that is herding goats or winning the Super Bowl. It is about being well rewarded for what we do, whether that is being paid a first-class salary for a big job or the thanks of a grateful soul for a kindness done. Success is about having great relationships and friends and about spending lots of time doing the things that really turn us on – whether that is playing more golf or spending more time with our children and loved ones. Above all, success is about achieving all these things at no one else’s expense or, even better, whilst helping those whose lives we touch being successful too.