The Deception of Success

I don't consider myself successful. Not in an overtly ambitious, scaling the heights of the steep career wall aggressively, sense anyway. I don't consider myself a failure either. I am content. I am happy with where I am and what I have achieved.  Mostly because I am not gripped by career fever and I have other things in life that drive me. I am also modest and aware.

Many on the other hand are not. Modesty is one thing but awareness is something else altogether.

There is a disease that I have witnessed first hand grip colleagues and friends, and it has to do with success. I could go into the subjective psychological and philosophical layers underlying what success means to you or me or the average person trying to make a mark out there. I won't. The concept is much simpler than that. It is about reaching unprecedented levels of achievement before your very own eyes, that it almost becomes intoxicating. One achievement drives another and another until one loses track of the means and reason. When that happens, there is no control over sinking deeper into a dementia of ambition. The result? Being totally and utterly consumed by one's own success that there is absolutely no awareness of all the compromises made.

It can happen to anyone. Success can give such a feeling of elation, a sense of achievement and a power that one perhaps didn't realise existed. A hunger for more is born. Success becomes a drug that is needed to feed that power within and it grows exponentially. When one is not aware and one is not modest, it turns into a disease. What would it take to taste one more bitter sweet success story? Forego humaneness, good manners or decency. In very mild forms, that's always how it begins. The ends justify the means. It becomes ok to be a little less polite, a little more aggressive, a little less humane, a little more robotic or as the corporate world might describe it more "business-like". Business is business after all, whatever that means. A whirpool that consumes mind and soul because, what after all these successes? It is all temporary. What remains is how you are able to (or unable to) face yourself and those who matter because life is short and we all die.

So stop.

Modesty and awareness are the controllers of success. They pace us. They make us evaluate our approach and get us in tune with our value system. They are the checks and balances of our achievements and they ground us so that we don't end up living in the castles that we build in our minds. Success can be a good thing, just not when we are deceived by it.

Be Who You Want to Be

There comes a time when all you want to do is just find a way to realise the person within you. A nagging sensation that pokes at the corners of your mind will not relent until you do. Distractions are just that and you look at them as time wasting exercises. And anything else that you find yourself engaged in only weighs your heart down further. When that happens there really is only one thing to do. There really is only one way out of this because ignoring it will do nothing more than to exacerbate it further. You need to follow that unadulterated notion and set it free.

The cynics out there might frown and wag their fingers. Impulse can be risky business but so can an unfulfilled life; living to be only half the person that you are.

A job can be one of two extremes - no in-between - it is that dramatic. At one end, a job can be nothing more than the ordinary meaning of the word and a means of gaining one's livelihood. It is that circle of comfort that is stretched every now and then to expand your skills and knowledge but, always, remaining within the confines of that circle. That is what we were taught growing up - get a good job and enjoy the comforts of life. Most jobs falls into this category, even those jobs that feign promises of career glory and progression. I have seen it happen over again, the bright spark wanes and you find yourself settling into your circle. That is usually the reason why most people move on.

At the other end of the scale, a job can be the means to make you explore never-ending avenues of innovation within yourself, as a person and as an individual. The job stops being just a job and instead metamorphosises into a personal goal to allow you to give it all that you can. It is all about personal ownership, being the best that you can and making your job the best that there is. When that happens, know that you have crossed the fine line of being, breathing and feeling entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship does not have to be viewed in the black or white sense of starting your own business. Instead, it is a concept and a way of approaching your life and career goals. Ones which you can realise in any sort of environment that you find yourself in. When creativity and ideas, bursting at the seams, yearn to be brought to life, you know that there is no better time. Just be who you want to be; who you need to be. If the circle that you find yourself in becomes nothing more than a limitation, expand and distort it to allow it to fulfill your ideals. And failing that, channel your own path. Here or elsewhere.

I will caveat all this and say that the life of an entrepreneur is not meant to be easy. There will be challenges and brick walls that slam you in the face but think of the alternative. Once you have set foot on that path there truly is no turning back to a life half fulfilled. The setbacks and challenges that you will encounter will multiply your resolve and provide you with energy to encourage you to persist beyond your expectations. That is what realising dreams is all about. It becomes a  matter of survival to be the person whom you were always meant to be.