🌳 TREE 98: Don’t judge your success by someone else’s standards
Our media streams are flooded with success.
Our feeds are engorged with success.
Our culture worships success.
Everywhere you look, the top 0.1%
or the top 0.1% wannabes
are showing you that success
is unattainable,
or,
more likely,
that success is yours for taking
when you simply take
this course, take
this pill, take
this shortcut. Take
this all with a shovel of salt.
Of course you already do.
You’re far too wise
to believe their lies.
But sometimes…
When the stream is especially full and fast
you drown for a little while
and measure your success
against someone else’s illusion.
Doesn’t it wash the colour from your world!
Doesn’t it drain the joy from your work!
Yes, doesn’t it plunge you through waves of despair?
Come up for air.
This week I’m thinking about work, doing work you love, and success. If you have thoughts about work to share, the FOREST would love to read them. Tap on the title or the comment button
Grow slowly.
Jeff
This is from my favourite album through most of my teenage years:
Every song from every past email:
John Gardner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Gardner) gave this talk in 1990 (https://fs.blog/great-talks/personal-renewal-john-gardner/). It is worth reading. Here are a couple excerpts:
One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.
You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.
But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it — as some suppose — a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Perhaps you imagine that by age 35 or 45 or even 33 you have explored those potentialities pretty fully. Don’t kid yourself!
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.
You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.
…
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
But those 0.1%ers just look so happy though!! And they have beautiful skin and amazing homes and nothing less than a 6 figure salary.... And they email me directly because they care. Oh and they aren't sharing their secrets with just anyone, only those with commitment and drive and credit cards...