Success is Not Happiness
Success is not Happiness,
Happiness is Success.
Those who mix up the two,
End their life in a mess.
We human beings are taught right from the time we are in school, that we must be the best. We must come first in class. We should succeed in cricket, in debates, and in quizzes. We have been indoctrinated into believing that Life = Success! We grow up being programmed to believe that we must be an achiever because achievement will give us happiness. But this is a myth. This is not true.
If success was happiness, then all the successful people in the world would be happy. But is this so? If we look around, we see misery in the homes of the rich and famous, which sometimes ends in suicide. If success was happiness, then the rich should be glad, not sad. Somehow, the world has grown up believing in the illusion that success is happiness.
There is no doubt that success gives us name and fame and it also creates wealth that gives us pleasure. But is pleasure happiness? Pleasure is only momentary happiness and although we may love a pizza, but if we are served 3 pizzas, chances are that we will be fed up. There is a Law of Diminishing Returns when it comes to the things we crave for.
Success is not bad, and everybody must work towards achieving something in life. But when we believe that only success can give happiness, we head in the wrong direction. We let our needs become our greed and we want more and more. For us human beings, enough is not enough. We live with desires and we crave till our grave, seeking happiness, but not being happy.
Then, there is the 'Paradox of Success'. While the Olympic champion celebrates victory with a gold medal, the one who gets the silver with half the prize money cries, because the expectation was to be the champion. Paradoxically, the one who received the bronze dances with joy because there was no expectation to win. Even when we achieve success like marrying the person we love or getting a dream job or the target that we were aiming at, we soon lose the excitement and yearn for something else.
Life is not just about achieving success. Once we achieve noteworthy success, we must learn to live life with contentment and fulfillment. If we make success the philosophy of our life, we may end up being an achiever, but we will not experience true happiness. We will be so busy chasing our dreams and heading towards the destination, that we will forget that life is a journey, not a destination.
Even if we achieve success, we end up being stressed and anxious, either protecting the title or the wealth we possess. Thus, we hardly enjoy it. Then we compare our success with that of others, and we become jealous and unhappy. What about those who fail? They end up being the most miserable! Right from the beginning, success creates stress and makes our life a mess. Somehow, the world believes that success is everything and somebody reading this for the first time, will think all this is garbage. Unless we introspect and contemplate the true purpose of life, we too will continue climbing the peak of achievement, which is an illusion. One day, we will fall off the cliff of that illusory journey, into our graves. Then life will be over.
Can we take our success with us? Nothing belongs to us. In the end, our success will dissolve and the very thing that promised us happiness will disappear. Alas, all that it did in the bargain was that it stole our life away!
Life is meant to be lived. Life is not a success chase. A very few people are fortunate to stop and understand the true meaning of life. They discover that the equation that they have been taught is wrong. Success is not happiness. Happiness is success! All through life, we seek to be successful, because we believe that success will give us happiness. But it doesn't! If we realize the truth that happiness is success, then we can develop the art of happiness and be happy without pursuing success.
The wise ones achieve the objective of success without wasting their life creating it. They live far more peaceful and blissful lives. They learn to achieve noteworthy success and then stop. They take an exit from the highway of achievement and live a life of contentment and fulfillment. All this because they realize the truth – Success is not happiness.
If we really want to live life, we must break the myth that the world lives with. The whole world is seeking happiness but chasing success. How will they ever find it! Happiness is not about achieving bliss. It is all about being happy. We must remember that we may have everything and still be unhappy, just as we may have nothing, but be very happy. If you are in the mad pursuit of success, it is time to stop and to live before life is over.
Finally, ask yourself this question - can you be successful all the time? You can’t. But can you be blissful all the time? You can. What would you choose?
IN A NUTSHELL