What Is Success?

This wise man once told me that to be successful in life you have to work hard. The question is, he told me. What exactly do you need to work hard at.

Do you need to work down a mine shaft for 18 hours while the fat boss sits in his office on the surface counting his money.

Do you need to study hard so that you can get a good job and then work hard again for a fat boss who drives a car more expensive than your house.

Do you have to ignore your friends and family and work hard to bring home the money to support them. Do you have to work hard with your relationship with your family and partner.

I will tell you one thing, the wise man told me. If it is hard then you are probably doing it wrong. Life is not about working hard. It is about enjoying the whole journey.

It is about having fun. Yes, sometimes you will have to push yourself beyond what you think is possible. That may be at a desk or in a sport or climbing up a mountain.

But even when you are hard at work, make sure you have fun doing it. Find a way to enjoy the process.

Do not get caught in a trap of working hard for many years and believe that one day you will have lots of money and then you will be free to do whatever you would love to do.

For here is the warning. You will never have enough of what you chase. There will never be a point where you can go, ok. I have enough money. I can stop working now and go away on holiday for a whole year.

I don't need to work anymore. Because deep inside, you will be addicted to working hard. You are used to the suffering and you find comfort in it. It has become normal.

When you decide to go away on a very long holiday, you will just feel guilty. Your ego will whisper in your ear. What if. What if the markets crash and you lose all your savings.

What if prices sky rocket and you find you have to go back to work. What if you have an accident or your partner or family member gets really ill and you have to work hard again to make sure you can pay for their treatment.

What ifs' are endless. There is always a reason to stop and there is always a reason to carry on working.

The problem is, it is only with age and experience that you start to understand what you have lost while you were spending all your time working hard.

But now it is too late. You cannot reclaim all that time you lost while your kids grew up. You cannot reclaim the time where you were your fittest and healthiest. You cannot reclaim all that time you lost with your partner.

They missed you while you were working all the time. They brought your kids up practically by themselves. You thought you were doing the right thing by working hard.

This is the way it is meant to be. But alas, you got it all wrong. Your kids and partner would have been happy with you as you are. They would rather have your time than your money.

And if it is just your money they want, then they too are lost. And you are not loved by them.

Deep down, humans crave time and love above all else. They strive to feel safe. Our children want our time and they want us to teach them about the world.

They want us to prepare them as best we can for the world they are going to face one day all alone.

If we lived in ancient times, you would not allow your son to go into the wild forest and fend for himself for 3 nights without teaching him everything he will need to know about surviving and even thriving.

You would not let a lesser man teach your son where failure means certain death. You would make sure you son was fully trained and aware of what he was going to face.

Every scenario you can think of. And yet, in the modern world, we barely teach them anything and expect them to go out into the world and thrive.

We allow others to teach our children the ways which serve others and not themselves.

We allow others to teach our children how to become part of a system that feeds the boss or government at the top. We do not teach our children how to fend for themselves.

How to be happy and joyful. And the biggest reason is that we don't know ourselves. We were taught and brought up to feed a system and so this is all we know.

We cannot stand up against the system because we don't know another way of being. We are full of fear of what if there isn't another way.

We are promised that one day we will become the fat boss. But does that ever happen. Or do we just keep grinding away, every day. Missing out on the most important aspects of life while we work hard.

Putting all our plans into a future that we may never see. Planning for a future that when it finally comes, we are exhausted from working hard.

When we finally stop, we don't recognise ourselves, we don't recognise our partner or our grown up children. They don't recognise us either. There is no relationship, only cupboard love.

They don't know who we are. We don't know ourselves. But what we do know and understand with absolute clarity is that it is too late. We have worked hard all our life.

We have lots of money but we suddenly realise that all that money we strived for cannot buy us what we really want in our life. What we really want is to do it all again and this time do it differently.

But it's too late. The time has passed. We just leave disappointment in our wake. They tried to tell us they didn't want the money.

They wanted us and our time but we didn't hear them or we didn't listen and so here we are. Alone. So heed my warning before it is too late.

Do not miss out on life while you work hard every day for a system that does not reward you in what really matters.

Make sure, if you do work hard, you love what you do deep in your heart. And that you spend time with your loved ones.

You appreciate them and you teach them about life. The most important people in your life are your partner and children. Always put them first and you will have a rich life.