We Can't Be Successful Without Knowing This

Can we be successful in chess, If we don't know what a checkmate is? Of course, we can't be. Similarly, if we don't know what real success is in the life game, we can't be successful in life too. Generally, we think we know what success is. But if we consider some life stories, we can realize that our general description of success is just a false assumption.

Is success earning a lot of money and being famous? 

  

I think almost everybody in this world knows Elvis Presley. Although he was very popular and rich, he had psychological problems in the last years of his life. He was using many prescription drugs and eating junk food to feel better. He died only at the age of 42 because of his unhealthy lifestyle.

  

Robin Williams was one of the most popular comedians in the world, but his end was a real tragedy. He hanged himself in his home.

There are many rich and famous people who died at an early age because of drugs and alcohol. Why did they use drugs and alcohol? Because they were unsatisfied and unhappy.

Is success reaching our goals?

  

Probably you know Christopher Columbus. Actually, his goal was going to the Far East, and although he never reached the Far East, he thought he had discovered a route to the Far East. Nevertheless, we acknowledge him as a successful explorer.

 

Do you know Magellan? Generally, we know him as the first explorer who circumnavigated the Earth. Actually, he couldn't complete the voyage that he began to circumnavigate the globe. He organized a Spanish expedition to find a westward route to the Spice Islands. The fleet commanded by Magellan departed from Spain and went to the West. Magellan managed to find the strait and passed through it. He sailed across the Pacific and reached the Philippines. Unfortunately, he was killed during the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. Only one of his ships managed to reach Spain and completed the first circumnavigation of Earth. Although he couldn’t finish his voyage, wasn’t he successful?

“How many times have we read about people who achieve their ultimate life goals only to say, “Is that all there is?” because they feel they have no place to go from the top? A classic example of this is several Apollo astronauts who prepared their entire lives for the ultimate mission: to land on the moon. When they finally did it they were euphoric, but after returning to earth, some of them developed a level of emotional depression beyond what most people could imagine.” 

Tony Robbins

What is Real Success?

I think you understand that success is not reaching our goals or being rich and famous. So what is success? To find the right answer, I'm going to hypothesize a possible answer and evaluate it on the life stories I share above. But before my hypothesis, I want to share a quotation from Tony Robbins.

"Obviously, we all have different dreams and ideas of what we want to create for our lives. In addition, I’m very clear that who you know, where you go and what you own are not the true measure of personal success. To me,success is the ongoing process of striving to become more. It is the opportunity to continually grow emotionally, socially, spiritually, physiologically, intellectually, and financially while contributing in some positive way to others. The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached."

I totally agree with the notion of Tony Robbins about success, but I want to propose a more simple and useful definition of success. Here is my proposal for the definition of success: Success is to improve ourselves as we move in the right direction and right way.

Let's evaluate the definition. Elvis and Robbin Williams were not successful at the end of their lives because their development had stopped. On the other Magellan and Christopher Columbus were successful, even though they couldn't reach their goals, because they moved in the right direction (to the West) and made many discoveries and so they caused many developments.

I think the biggest advantage of my definition of success is to decrease the fear of failure. How? If we learn from our mistakes, we can improve ourselves and so we can accept our mistakes as a means to achieve success.

 

 After the definition of success, I'm going to try to find an answer to the question of how we can be successful. First of all, according to the definition, we can make a step-by-step success formula like this:

1. Find the right direction
2. Move in the right way
3. Improve yourself

That is the end of this article. Congratulations!  In my next blog article, I'm going to write about finding the right direction.