In order to be successful in life, you need to do a lot of hard work. “Success is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration”, or however the quote actually goes. In order to do that much work, you need to be highly motivated to do so. But if you’re already happy, what’s the motivation? Why would you feel any need to improve?? Why would any happy person put their state of happiness at risk in order to meet some far-off goal???
Do you know of anybody who genuinely happy is otherwise accomplished and successful in their life?
I have a friend who is extremely lucky in her life—she lives in a home and a town she loves, has a great long-term relationship, and has managed to make money (and get a good deal of acclaim) at a profession she loves and which she’s very good at.
Come to think of it, why am I friends with her? I feel like slashing my wrists . . .
I know a lot of people who are fairly unhappy and fairly unsuccessful(I identify with them, lol). I even know a few who are fairly successful and still unhappy. This leads me to believe that success has little bearing on the moods of the surly folks I know
It might depend on how you define “successful.” Doing a good job in a field you enjoy that doesn’t pay much money can still be considered successful. Likewise, you can make a shitload of dough doing something you despise and be looking for a rafter to throw the rope over. Success is a personal thing and can only be measured against your own expectations.
Using common definitions of success you could argue that people always have to sacrifice certain aspects of their life eg. work v. family, personal interest v. standard of living - does anyone truly not have to make the choice between a certain aspect of their lives and ‘success’?
I have a friend who was a self-made millionaire by the age of forty. He retired on his 40th birthday and has spent the last ten or twelve years doing exactly as he pleases. He and his family lived aboard their very nice boat for five or six years, splitting each year between the Bahamas and Florida. Evertime I see the guy, he is smiling—so there is one guy who is very successful and happy as a lark.
My Dad is very successful and very happy. He’s well respected in his field(anesthesiologist - not sure of the spelling but he puts patients to sleep for the purposes of surgery and in some cases childbirth) and always has a smile on his face - always.
It depends how you define success - can be misleading even if it means getting what you really want…
…what I really want is to face interesting challenges to my understanding and intellect; since this happens many times daily, I must therefore be successful (I’m getting what I want, which, in a way, is to never quite get everything I want) and I’m very happy about this.
If I’m happy, am I successful? I’m not wealthy by any means, but I make a good living doing stuff I like to do, and I’m where I am by dint of much hard work, which is mostly behind me now. Or maybe it’s just easier to do…; no, I definitely worked a lot harder in the past.
Umberto Eco seems like a jolly chap. If I were Umberto Eco, I’d be pretty hapy with my lot, too. I saw a documentary about him on BBC Four last week. On that documentary, speaking about Eco, was Roberto Benigni, the film director. Now he’s quite successful (won international awards for Life is Beautiful), and is almost pathologically happy.
Jimmy Carter. He has made the most of his opportunities, in a gentle zen-like way. His smile has gone from caricature to true joy. I admire his work ethic and moral ethic. I wish I were like him, to be honest.
Back at the beginning of the century, there seems to have been a kind of energetic, extroverted activist type who was always busy being wildly successful, changing the world, and having a wonderful time doing it. The kind of person who threw himself into every experience with enthusiasm and enjoyed even things that sound pretty unpleasant because he was interested in everything. For instance Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Riis, maybe Kipling. Are there still people like that around?
