The Business Of Living In 2010
It's the time of year to celebrate, and our culture celebrates success
. What successes of the past year do you have to celebrate? What did you DO with your life this year?
Sometimes it can seem that one year looks just like any other. You spend five days of every week at your job, and then jam chores, family, and friends into the weekends. You mix in a few holidays and take a vacation or two (yet one-third of Americans don't take all their vacation days, forfeiting 4 of them). If this seems too familiar, I'm betting you've accepted someone else's definition of success instead of creating your own. Perhaps it's time to challenge the idea of what success looks like for you, and then make going for it your business in 2010.
Need ideas? Here are some ways others have defined success.
- Success is a journey, not a destination.
- Success is the achievement of something planned, desired or attempted.
- Success is... making a difference, loving your work, financial freedom, independence, contentment (pick one).
When England was facing its darkest days during World War II, Winston Churchill redefined success so he and the British people could keep their spirits up and press on to victory. His definition: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
And then there's this one: "He who dies with the most toys wins."
The late Earl Nightingale notes this: "Everything that's free to us we place little value on. Everything we have to pay for we value. The paradox is that the exact opposite is true. Everything that's really worthwhile in life came to us free. Our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence, our love of family, children, and friends, our country - all these priceless possessions are free. But the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time. A good man can be completely wiped out and make another fortune. He can do that several times. Even if a home burns down, we can rebuild it, but the things we get for nothing we can never replace."
Do we really need a bigger house, a newer car, a higher-status title on our business card? Or would we prefer to know that we have helped another, that we have been kind to our planet Earth, that we gave reasons to be remembered after we're gone?
Maybe we make success too complicated and expensive. My son spent several weeks in Kenya living among people whose homes were made of dung, who found it futile to shoo flies away from their eyes and lips because their homes have no windows, and whose monthly income for the family was much less than $100. Yet my son remarked that these people were the happiest, most carefree people he'd ever met. It's hard to imagine that a family living in a dung hut might have succeeded in being happier than you or I.
Perhaps success isn't a measure of how much we have, but of how little we need.
Take an active approach in defining what success means for you, and then work toward that in the coming year. Stop letting others define success for you. Who cares if the Jones' DO live next door? The business of living is your own business. A year from now I'd like you to be able to look back on 2010 knowing that you succeeded in taking care of some really important business: your life.
Copyright 2009 Paul Johnson.
by: Paul Johnson
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