Compared to What?
The words of the incomparable 'Uncle Syd' from Sam Sommers' book Situations Matter.
How do you define success? With whom or what are you comparing yourself to? What are you using as the set point? William James, widely regarded as the father of American psychology contemplated suicide at the age of 27. He wasn't where he wanted to be in life and in comparison to the success of his father and his older brother achieved in their respective fields, he believed he was a failure at this point in his life.
Fortunately he put off his suicide until he conducted his famous habit experiment on himself and thus found his niche in life. Webster's defines success as : the accomplishment of an aim or a purpose. That leaves us a lot of space to fill in those blanks, provided we want to be the ones to actually fill in those blanks.
Many of us fill in these spaces with someone else's thinking. We learn to value what our 'tribe' values. Or worse, we value what the 'tribe' we aspire to be a part of values. The beauty is that if we choose to, we can fill in those spaces with our own thoughts. What would happen if we remove the filter of how we wish to be perceived by others and we're just comfortable with who we are? In order to do this we first must remove the filter of how we perceive ourselves. We are often our most harshest critic. We say things to ourselves in criticism that we would seldom say to our sworn enemies. These self criticisms are also someone else's thinking.
Who we are, how we wish to be perceived, and what we aspire to be can frequently be three different things. Humans can't help but compare themselves to other humans in just about every metric that exists. It's what we do and it leads us to many problems. Consciously working to improve ourselves little by little and day by day and simply gauging where we are in relation to yesterday's self is my approach to success. If we pay more attention to context and gain more perspective in our lives I think we can all be more successful in filling those spaces in that definition with the substance of our own thinking and be successful in our own right.
Reference
Situations Matter by Sam Sommers
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
How do you define success? With whom or what are you comparing yourself to? What are you using as the set point? William James, widely regarded as the father of American psychology contemplated suicide at the age of 27. He wasn't where he wanted to be in life and in comparison to the success of his father and his older brother achieved in their respective fields, he believed he was a failure at this point in his life.
Fortunately he put off his suicide until he conducted his famous habit experiment on himself and thus found his niche in life. Webster's defines success as : the accomplishment of an aim or a purpose. That leaves us a lot of space to fill in those blanks, provided we want to be the ones to actually fill in those blanks.
Many of us fill in these spaces with someone else's thinking. We learn to value what our 'tribe' values. Or worse, we value what the 'tribe' we aspire to be a part of values. The beauty is that if we choose to, we can fill in those spaces with our own thoughts. What would happen if we remove the filter of how we wish to be perceived by others and we're just comfortable with who we are? In order to do this we first must remove the filter of how we perceive ourselves. We are often our most harshest critic. We say things to ourselves in criticism that we would seldom say to our sworn enemies. These self criticisms are also someone else's thinking.
Who we are, how we wish to be perceived, and what we aspire to be can frequently be three different things. Humans can't help but compare themselves to other humans in just about every metric that exists. It's what we do and it leads us to many problems. Consciously working to improve ourselves little by little and day by day and simply gauging where we are in relation to yesterday's self is my approach to success. If we pay more attention to context and gain more perspective in our lives I think we can all be more successful in filling those spaces in that definition with the substance of our own thinking and be successful in our own right.
Reference
Situations Matter by Sam Sommers
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
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