January 14, 2014
There are many who aim to be successful in life but at times decide to give up and may even take their own lives or turn to drugs or alcohol because they feel they failed to achieve the level of success that was acceptable to them. However, the unfortunate part about this is that many, who desperately seek success, do not truly understand what success is. Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Take for example the CNN hero of the year Chad Pregracke, who has dedicated his life to clean the Mississippi River and other waterways. For the past 15 years he has removed over 7 million pounds of trash from the rivers and during that time he found his nonprofit “Living Lands and Waters” and was able to get 70,000 people to volunteer to help him.
When CNN was asking readers to cast ballots for the hero of the year award, I had to vote for him because he really exemplifies what success is. There is nothing more ordinary than removing trash from a river and yet he did it so extraordinarily well that he became a success story. That is not to say that what the others did, did not exemplify success. If you read their profiles, what they did is exactly that. They did ordinary things extraordinarily well because they found passion in doing simple things really well. It does not matter what success story you might read about. You will often find that just about every success story is rooted in this principle.
That is the reason that it pains me when I hear people beating themselves up or even taking their own lives because they feel they failed to achieve their goals and by doing so let their loved ones down. Many have come to believe also that success can only be defined by money and yet there are millionaires out there that feel like absolute failures as well. When we experience such feelings we need to step back, dig deep into our souls, and find the source of such feelings. When we do that many times we may find that such beliefs are rooted in other people’s expectations of what success means to them and our desperate struggle to meet their expectations rather than ours. We need to define for ourselves what success is. Only then will we be able to find a sense of peace and satisfaction that can bring happiness to our lives.