My Own Utopian Experiment #10: Redefine success and failure to be real self
As a reminder, I want every post to be a discussion rather than a lecture. I shared a poem that describes my past a few years journey very well last week. I want to share two sentences from my old journal related to this topic. I feel it is still valid.
“True success means my days are full of meaningful activities, loving and supportive people. I am present with my days and really savor them. Authentic human experience!”
To me, simple life means I focus on what’s really important and let the rest go. The more time and energy you spend on what’s less important, the less time and energy I have for what’s really matters. It affects all areas, my attitude, beliefs, stories telling myself, money, my stuff and so on. I personally had to redefine successes and failure as the first step. It cleared my mental spaces, reevaluate values and shifting my days toward what’s important.
With this mindset, there’s nothing more important on this planet than figuring out what I want, where I want to go, who I love, who loves me, what I love and what brings peace. At least in my experience, I was not able to feel grounded without knowing these. Having no clue on these meant a lots of wondering around and soul searching in a too much desperate way to validate my existence. It will be a life-long journey for me since my needs are changing but I am in progress heading to the right direction. That is all matters to me. That’s good enough.
No external measures can determine my worth or feeling of contentment. I am still striving for good work but my goals are different. Now, I am not so heavily focused on someone else’s approval or superficial achievements. I need to meet the team’s goals which I signed up for. I know if I did good or bad. I am self-reliant. I approve myself. I also do not associate my capabilities with my worth at all. It is merely a feature. We all do better on different things. Regardless of what we can do certain things, I feel we are all equal.
True success is also living in my terms and everyone has different ones. It is coming from inside, Inner peace, being present, enjoying my day, set aside time for important things to me, family, my health, inner peace, hobbies, rituals that help me, friends and just be in each moment. I shed lots of tears and agony to come to this point from the previous life that more focused on external achievements that were taught throughout my life. If we are not careful, it is everywhere, media, stories other people tell or stories we tell ourselves, people around us and even schools, personal experiences, childhood, etc.
I had to re-learn it is ok to waste time a little and do not need to be productive in all area of life and all the time. Treat the experience and discovery process as adventure. People including me tend to be afraid of choosing a wrong path and end up wasting time and resources. I once read this definition in a book and I liked it. Journey is the path you take when you know the final destination. Adventure is the path you take you do not know where is the final destination. We get lost and wonder around a lot in adventure so wasting little times sound reasonable to me. I really believe it is too important not to invest to know more about ourselves. I wish my child gets to know himself and test things out. Epic adventure! Imagine your life surrounded by people you love, hobbies and activities that are meaningful to you. Your days are full of it and you are in it every day and every moment. What’s the really loss in that adventure? I say this often in my blog. I believe our life purpose is to figure out who we really are.
We also need to redefine failure as well. I think there’s no real failure. It is just one of so many human experiences, an episode in life just like others. It is just our interpretation and the story we tell ourselves. I had many “failures” in my life. At least, they felt like failures back then. Many of them were disguised as failure at the moment but it had its true meaning hidden in a long run. My small wisdom back then could not comprehend it but it revealed the gem later. It almost feels that the entire universe is taking care of me. It knows when I do not know. It knows where I should not go. It puts a stop on me and I was making a fuss about it. If something is not working out, it just does not mean to be mine or I can decide to pursue harder and longer. I can trust my intuition more since the universe got my back. I say this a lot from my life experiences. I became my motto!
My simple life journey began with redefining success and failures. It gave me lots of hopes, clarities, inner peace and even more freedom. I let go of things that holding me back for so long from living in my terms instead of living someone else’s dreams and standards. It was the decluttering my mental and emotional baggage. Don’t we all want to live freely to feel contentment by living our own terms? God helps the ones who help themselves. Go for it!