Issues With Success
What is success? Is success money, happiness, neither or both? I was thinking about this the other day while having a fairly in-depth discussion about life and careers with a friend of mine and started wondering if I would ever consider myself a success. I’ve stated before that every time I accomplish a goal, no matter how difficult the goal is, be it getting the cover story of a national magazine, earning my black belt, or graduating from college, upon the completion of the accomplishment, after an initial burst of happiness, I oftentimes feel less successful than before. There’s something in my brain that keeps telling me that if I accomplished something it must have been easier to do than I thought.
Truthfully, when it comes to my writing it does come easily to me, which is a blessing and a curse. I can pen a great feature story in a very short amount of time and hand it in with little hesitation that it will be well liked. Great, right? Well, it’s great in that I when I have a lot of work I can handle it all, but whenever I finish something quickly I feel slightly hollow. Rather than thinking "hey, I must be a great writer" more often than not I’m thinking "that was easy therefore this task must have been easy." I know deep down that the latter, the way I’m thinking, can’t be correct because I have people tell me about how they labored (and some still labor) in school with papers, spending hours upon hours on them and even upon completion still not feeling like they’ve done the work correctly. In college I was finishing ten page papers in one writing session, handing them in after reading them over once, and having professors tell me that my work was great (you can hate me for that later, I’m on a train of thought here and I haven’t arrived at my stop yet).
So is it a money thing? Would I feel the same way if I was making more? Life would sure be easier, I can’t deny that, and in a weird way I think it would give me a boost in that I would feel like my work was being appreciated on another level, but I think my real problem might be some sort of inner self esteem issue, the idea that if I can accomplish something it’s not that difficult. The irony of all this is that if one takes a look at my career and how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am today they’d see how hard it has been. But this isn’t just a work life issue, this affects my personal life, as well. There are times when I’ve gotten girls’ numbers and then completely lost interest because I could get their numbers.
After all this have I even come close to answering my original question? Have I figured out what success is? Not really. All I’ve figured out is that even if I find success it’s going to take someone else to point it out to me for me to figure it out. I’m not blind to the success of others, only to my own, and maybe that’s a good thing. Though it may cause me some stresses and pains in the self-worth department, at least my ego will never get completely out of control and I’ll always be striving for something more.
Truthfully, when it comes to my writing it does come easily to me, which is a blessing and a curse. I can pen a great feature story in a very short amount of time and hand it in with little hesitation that it will be well liked. Great, right? Well, it’s great in that I when I have a lot of work I can handle it all, but whenever I finish something quickly I feel slightly hollow. Rather than thinking "hey, I must be a great writer" more often than not I’m thinking "that was easy therefore this task must have been easy." I know deep down that the latter, the way I’m thinking, can’t be correct because I have people tell me about how they labored (and some still labor) in school with papers, spending hours upon hours on them and even upon completion still not feeling like they’ve done the work correctly. In college I was finishing ten page papers in one writing session, handing them in after reading them over once, and having professors tell me that my work was great (you can hate me for that later, I’m on a train of thought here and I haven’t arrived at my stop yet).
So is it a money thing? Would I feel the same way if I was making more? Life would sure be easier, I can’t deny that, and in a weird way I think it would give me a boost in that I would feel like my work was being appreciated on another level, but I think my real problem might be some sort of inner self esteem issue, the idea that if I can accomplish something it’s not that difficult. The irony of all this is that if one takes a look at my career and how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am today they’d see how hard it has been. But this isn’t just a work life issue, this affects my personal life, as well. There are times when I’ve gotten girls’ numbers and then completely lost interest because I could get their numbers.
After all this have I even come close to answering my original question? Have I figured out what success is? Not really. All I’ve figured out is that even if I find success it’s going to take someone else to point it out to me for me to figure it out. I’m not blind to the success of others, only to my own, and maybe that’s a good thing. Though it may cause me some stresses and pains in the self-worth department, at least my ego will never get completely out of control and I’ll always be striving for something more.
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