The conventional idea of success has many factors. Is it wealth and material status symbols like a big house and a fancy car? Is it experiences of traveling the world? Is it long-term relationships and a sense of belonging? Is it a prominent career? Does it look like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”? The most important question is, “What does success mean to me?” If you don’t identify what success means to you, how will you know when you have achieved it? And once you have achieved your personal vision of success, do you think you will be happy?
I’d like you to consider that happiness may be the opposite of conventional success. Happiness is not about having things. It’s more about ceasing to want things. Satisfaction. When you stop caring about attaining everything that could be…and focus instead on enjoying what is… you are happy.
Sometimes you could become unhappy when you are thinking that life isn’t the way it should be. You are judging and comparing. You may decide that you need to change something before your life can really begin. You may think you need to lose 20 pounds before you can meet Mr. Right. Or you may believe that you need to leave Mr. Wrong before you can be happy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that way. This is your life, right NOW. The only time there is. If you decide you can’t be happy until…then you will be disappointed. THIS IS IT! Are you happy?
Being happy can be the simplest thing in the world. You just need to do something that completely occupies your attention. You need to shut down the mind chatter and focus within. Some people do extreme sports to quiet their internal monologue. The danger requires their complete attention so there is room for nothing else. Then the thoughts about everything that they think is wrong in their life quiets down. Unfortunately, some people use destructive means to do the same thing. Drugs. Alcohol. Gambling. Sex. Sometimes we feel the need to escape our perceived reality.
We all have an experiencing self who lives in the present and knows the present. The experiencing self is capable of re-living the past but basically it lives only in the present moment. It is fully aware and conscious of events and perceptions right now. As you read these words, you are in the experiencing self.
We all also have a remembering self. What we decide to keep from our experiences becomes our memory, the story. This is the self that maintains our story. It is the self who repeats our story to our self and to others. It reinforces our belief in the way things are or were in the past. But, our memories are adaptable and flexible. Each time we remember something we recreate it.
Our stories are defined by significant emotional moments and changes. Mostly, our stories are defined by how they end. Endings are very, very important. The remembering self is the one who makes the decisions about what to do in the present based on how the story ended in the past. It decides whether we are happy with our memory of what happened.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics, says that our experiencing selves and our remembering selves perceive happiness differently. Your experiencing self is the part of you who is happy in the experience of life. You are enjoying the moment. Your remembering self is the part of you who is happy with your experience of life. You are enjoying the story you are telling because you like the way it ended.
So, are you happy in the experience of your life? Know that you can always go within to experience a sense of peace and happiness. Are you happy remembering the story of your life? Know that you decide on your story and how you tell it. You have great power to create happiness. You choose. And perhaps that is really the meaning of success.