The Ultimate Success in Life is How Happy you are Every day
In our current society, we have been conditioned to believe that success means getting the best degree from the best universities, being promoted at work or accumulating financial wealth. If we don’t achieve these tasks, we feel like we have failed. From childhood to adulthood, we’ve been conditioned to believe success is amassing material wealth and being number one at everything. However, this is far from the truth. The definition of success, in my opinion, is someone who is striving to be happy every day.
I am not making an argument that we shouldn’t be aiming to obtain wealth. From when I can remember as a child, we were constantly struggling and lived in poverty for most of my life. When you grow up in this sort of environment, you become very motivated by material items which you think will result in happiness. In fact, I strongly believe that everybody should strive to become financially established. Having financial freedom is one of the most important fundamentals in life. It allows us to dictate our own time and do things that we enjoy, and it enables us to pursue our passions. It provides us with options, however, what most people fail to recognize about money is that it does not intrinsically make us happy. If you are not content without wealth, it is unlikely that you will be with it. I know this from first-hand experience.
When I was doing my Master’s, I was struggling financially, I had just gotten divorced, lost everything, sharing a place with three other people and working 6 days a week at a factory driving a forklift making $15/hour — I was living paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes, I didn’t have gas money to put into my car to pick up my kids. I was waiting for my house to sell and every day I imagine how wonderful it was going to be once I had that money from the sale of my house in my bank account. The day I went to deposit the cheque in my bank account, which was a substantial amount of money, I felt so empty. It was like nothing had changed. Yes, I was capable of purchasing more materialistic items, but it didn’t change who I was intrinsically. I realized from then on that I was never going to become a slave to money, instead, I was going to continually seek happiness through other avenues.
Warren Buffett, the world-renown American investor who is worth over $70 billion noted that “when you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have loved you, do love you,” I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them,” Buffett continued. “If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is — your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.” Similarly, Bill Gates the second richest man in the world said the ultimate guide to happiness is the meaningful relationships you build with people — and the ability to help others who are in need.
Success is not measured by the amount of money you have made or materialistic items you have accumulated over a lifetime. Success is your ability to build meaningful relationships and strive to be happy daily despite the challenges you may encounter. Success is being happy with who you are despite the world telling you otherwise. In my community, there’s a lot of pressure placed on women to get married and especially to have kids.
These expectation has placed an undue burden on a lot of women to get into relationship or get married prematurely because they have been told since childhood that their value or success in life is defined by being married and creating a family. While having a family is wonderful, a lot of women get into the wrong marriage/relationships with the expectation that they will be happy because that’s what they have been taught. But oftentimes these marriages/relationships end up being empty because people are expecting their significant other to bring them happiness. Circumstantial happiness is short-lived, but the happiness that is derived from within lasts forever.
There is an African proverb that said: “rain beats the leopard’s skin, but it does not wash out the spots”. What this proverb is conveying to us, is that we can try to hide who we are by masking it with material items or within a relationship that we think will change us, but fundamentally if we haven’t change who we are, we will remain the same. The leopard can never get rid of the spots because inherently it is a part of him. Similarly, relationships and material wealth, will not change who we are if we have not intrinsically changed from within.
It is important to realize what makes you happy and what doesn’t. In his popular book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Steve Covey notes “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are or, as we are conditioned to see it”. Sometimes the world doesn’t create barriers for us we create our own internal barriers because we have been conditioned to see the world a certain way. To be happy is a choice. But to be good at anything in life you need to make a conscious effort and practice. Happiness is earned when we enjoy the journey and stop looking forward to the destination.
