Pursuing a worthy ideal as success

A success is anyone who is doing deliberately, a predetermined job, because that’s what he decided to do, deliberately.

— Earl Nightingale

The time to achieve success, or the pursuit of a worthy ideal where you feel like you are making progress and enjoying the process, maybe a long one. Time requires the patience to endure the obstacles in the way and conceptualize them as mere players in the game and useful to practice your ability to be impermanent in the face of uncertainty. The pursuit of a worthy ideal is also by definition the pursuit of multiple possible ideas; the experimentation of multiple avenues that may be your road to success, or maybe not. Having an attitude of experimentation seems particularly relevant in the early part of your life when it is challenging to identify the ideal worth pursuing and committing to.

There are an infinite number of possibilities, and such ample choice often stifles twenty-somethings (as author Meg Jay puts it in her book), who don’t even know where to look because looking itself feels dangerous and the road full of unidentified scary objects. One can experience reality only by making a decision—one at a time—as to which ideal to pursue. Dipping your toes in unexplored waters, with the full commitment to discover whether that ideal—that territory—is worth pursuing. When committing to an ideal—a possible career, a life partner, or friends—there are shiny objects reflecting on the water as you move your feet through it. These can often seem attractive like the sirens were to Odysseus. They are frequently just attractive because your status-seeking brain may think so. But choosing an ideal worth pursuing based on the status it confers to your image to the external world may be a trap, and a very tempting one.

By exploring the many options in front of you and deploying patience and commitment to uncovering possible worthy ideals, you can concurrently develop your ability to discern the wheat from the chaff; use your increasingly sharper iron sword to cut through the overgrown foliage that is part of any meaningful journey in life. This is a way to get to the other side of the forest into a more familiar and worthy ideal.