Why I am not successful and I am happy

Bookstores, magazines and online we are surrounded by guides, tips, suggestions and testimonials on how to be successful.

Everywhere success, success and success

But actually, what is success?

The answer may seem simple but in fact defining success is a rather complicated task.

When considering success within a social contest, the common and immediate meaning is linked to competition and the idea of prevailing on others, even if with merit.

Normally the success of one is always at the expense of others. Some philosophers are saying that even our birth is somehow at the expense of the unborn ones who could have been in our place.

But when we are moving out of a social contest, the search for a satisfactory meaning of success is challenging and a single definition may not even exist, there may in fact be different definitions for every person.

Personally, the most satisfactory definition I could think of is reaching happiness.

But happiness has nothing to do with prevailing, it is about inner achievement, the happening of discovering and acting of our self in relation to our world.

Actually the origin of the word success refers to the verb happen, to action that comes after.

We are instead used to associate success with pleasure, the narcissistic pleasure of appearing better than others, by getting a bigger house, bigger car, higher job, more followers on social media.

So trying to categorize, the first meaning could be identified as an external success while the second as an internal one.

The real success is the one we don’t need to show because it is our own and it cannot be compared with others.

Nobody can tell how to reach the internal success, there are no tips, no guides, no books for it.

Our own success will arrive only after a long, and sometimes heavy, work done day by day to learn who we really are, after having looked inside ourselves, everywhere also where maybe we would not have liked to go.

The first step is to abandon the desperate pursuit of external success and sometimes this is a huge and not easy step but once it is done, there is an immediate sense of freedom while stress and anxiety levels drop drastically.

A relaxed and stress free mind is the essential start of our search for inner success because it is a journey which requires honesty, freedom, empathy and acceptance.

There is no way around, it is not easy and it takes a lot of effort but it is worth all of it because once we reach our own inner success, our lives make sense, our own sense.

It is a day by day job made of small progress and lots of setbacks but as long as we do not lose sight of our intent and maintain the awareness of what we want to achieve, we will succeed.

In fact there is no way back, like when after we stop smoking, the nicotine smell is understandable and we wonder how it was possible we have been smoking, the same the external success will be meaningless, wondering how we put so much importance to it.

Beside personal personal development and well being, abandoning the run for social success is the most effective way to live a sustainable and environmentally conscious life. In fact one of the fundamental pillars of external success is consumption, continuous and increasing consumption for the exclusive benefit of an economic model without future.

This alone should be a sufficient reason to stop right now, today, to think about our lives as a socially successful path and instead to start the discovery of our unexplored inner universe.