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Life Arts    H4'ed 11/29/12

What Does Success Mean To You?

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This article was inspired by checking out a page on Brainpickings.com
How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love
The page included a collection of people discussing aspects of finding what you love. 
Alain De Botton has an interesting statement from a TED talk he gave. 

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along."

So, after reading this, it got me wondering about people's ideas of success. What is success to you?
I went to check out some quotes on the opednews.com quotation database and found these on success. 

I'm prone to favor Thoreau, so here's his:
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
and here's another by Thoreau:
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal -- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation . . .

Not exactly talkin' about money or power. 

Writer/literary agent Donald Maas says,  
"What will make you successful is your stories, nothing else. Make them strong and you can do anything."  [full quote] 


Then, there's Emerson-- here are a few:
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."  Emerson
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."  Emerson
"It is not the length of life, but the depth."  Emerson
But they're kind of saying how to get there. 
I'll take a stab at what success is. I hope you'll add your comments too.
Success is waking up in the morning, excited about what you're going to be doing. 
Success is working each day until you you drop, and loving every minute of it. 
Success is being surrounded by people who love and care about you-- and you feeling the same about them. 
Here are a few from my old quotation page:
You can be anything you want to be. That's a good starting place. Anything else and you sell yourself short and compromise your dreams. Your dreams have wings but no feet, no ground, until you put yourself in them and give them life.
You will never achieve anything you don't decide you want to try to reach. That's a reality.
You must decide to become who you want to be. Then you can make plans to become that person-- to learn the skills, meet the challenges, overcome the obstacles and focus the energy necessary to achieve your success.   Rob Kall
and 

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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