Success is a relative term.
There is the success that is enjoyed by the very, very few who work very hard, who are very smart and who are in the right place at the right time and everything just comes together and the next thing you know you are a billionaire. That does happen, of course, and that is undeniably success by any measure.
Then there is the everyday success that a lot more people enjoy. I count myself among that group. Well, I do until things go tits up which could happen at any time to anyone...just ask the cold dead corpse of James Gandolfini who was on top of the world until he unexpectedly cashed in his chips. Or ask one of the
thousands of the previously retired who had it all until the economy went south and never really came back. Because that's life and you just never know what is going to happen.
But I am successful in my own eyes because 1) I'm not broke. I'm not wealthy but I'm doing okay and 2) I am doing something that I truly enjoy and I make a fairly substantial amount of money doing it. In other words, I am at peace with my lot in life. Thanks to the Obama Depression my flight path to wealth was seriously taken down but I'm okay with it. I survived it. So far. And I think that I will be okay, God willing, into the future. As long as my health holds out for another twenty or thirty years.
Anyway...I came upon this secret to success for myself a few years ago. It came to me a couple of years after the Obama Depression started and it was obvious that things weren't going to go the way that I had planned. What I finally figured out was that life was too short to spend doing things that I didn't care for. I found that I enjoyed life more and actually did better financially when I spent more time doing the things that I liked doing and de-emphasized the things that I didn't like doing all that much. I still have to do some things that I don't care for...I just spend less time worrying about those types of things. This results in a lot less stress for me and a lot more enjoyment in my life's work.
And the thing is...I just kind of stumbled into this discovery. Before I moved to a small town and started a small business I was in the corporate world and I was on an executive path. There is a good chance that if I had stayed there I might be considerably wealthier than I am now but almost certainly I would also be miserable. I might be divorced now instead of on my way to thirty years of marriage because the corporate life sort of encourages that sort of thing. I probably wouldn't know my children very well at all.
But instead, about twenty years ago, I got off of that path and onto this one. I have never regretted that decision. And now, after all of these years I have figured a few things out. I mean, it wasn't just the change of "careers" although that most certainly had a lot to do with it. As I said above, it's only in the last couple of years that I figured out that I needed to stop worrying about and working on my weaknesses but rather to devote my limited resources to those things that I was really good at and really enjoyed. And just like that, I started enjoying life more and doing better than I ever have.
Just recently I found someone else that figured this out and explained it a whole lot better than I just did. When I saw this, when I heard what the guy had to say, I thought that this is exactly what I realized a couple of years ago. And since this guy is obviously doing what he enjoys and what he's really good at I thought that it was something that I should probably post here just in case it's something that others might be interested in.
So...here it is. This is the first part. There are others. None of them are very long and they are pretty easy to watch.
