The Principles are the distillation of all that I have experienced, that has led toward my understanding of success. Success is a very complex subject, and these principles help establish some foundational ideas for readers to contemplate and consider as we each make daily efforts to strive for new levels of success in our own lives.
Definition
In order to present a work of information and research and experience to you, I think it’s helpful for us to all be on the same page as to what we’re discussing. The word success gets a lot of use and has many meanings in the English language. It can describe a result – a successful first date, an individual – a natural-born success, or any number of other things. But for the purpose of success in The Study Of Success, what we’re studying is the state of success and the attainment of it – the “success” that most people are interested in – which is really just a state of happiness, contentment, and wellbeing; the state of existence where life is, on the whole, overwhelmingly positive, progress is always being made and realized, and the results and fruits of our efforts are always keeping up with and supporting the continued expansion and growth of our desires, and the manifestation of our visions. Read more..
I think it was in my twenties that I first became acquainted with what I would call success, and really became addicted to seeking success. Using addicted and success in the same sentence almost feels kind of dirty to write, I think because of the connotations that the word carries with it, and our overtly pious predilection toward humility, our guilt surrounding abundance and accumulation of wealth, the looking down-upon of selfishness, and generalized self-deprecation. I never felt that way though. The success, which truly is more aptly referred to as happiness that I attained wasn’t at anyone’s expense. It wasn’t lavish, nor was it wasteful. It was a state of comfort, contentment, enjoyment, growth, experience, and expansion. It was what we all wish for others, but can never find the strength and self-worth to wish upon ourselves.
I had that success for a long time, setting myself up for it through hard work and determination, but unfortunately I didn’t keep up with the growth that got me there. I got to a place of comfort, and failed to continue to advance. I enjoyed more and more of what life had to offer, not also remembering to enjoy the expansion I could pursue, also. I became comfortable, and quit seeking new growth. On the outside, though I continued to live as though my success was continuing to grow, becoming a bigger greater person to others, and to my own ego, but never becoming that on the inside. It caught up with me, and the conditions of my life enacted a shift in my life, and while it was unfortunate that I didn’t keep up, life led me to a new chapter of learning, reflection, introspection, and all kinds of thoughtful consideration and contemplation.
I credit these setbacks with being the genesis point for this treatise, and the catalyst for this work to come into fruition.
Time
The study and mastery of success revolves around the management of time. Living in a time-based existence, one where life unfolds in a linear fashion, we are journey and progress-focused. It’s one of the rarely-contemplated attributes of our existence, and this awareness as it pertains to success and happiness is of paramount importance. Every successful person is someone who has mastered time, which is to say they have understood all of what their responsibilities are, and have addressed and tackled all their tasks in a manner that promotes the smooth unfolding of success. Everything is sequential, and if one has ten steps but does them out of order, some before others and some of the first last, they will forever find themselves in a quandry wondering why time continues to pass but they seem unable to ever accomplish anything.
Time is really the basis of all success. It’s the drawing board for success, if you will – the palette on which we paint our lives – and it’s the choices and actions and activities that we make and engage in within each day that are the catalysts to definite shifts and changes in our state of existence.
We’re all equally and evenly favored when it comes to opportunity…
In describing success, I use time as an important element, really, the basis of success to illustrate to people that we are all equally-equipped and endowed with equal opportunity to succeed. We may not all be starting at the same place. We may be in different situations, and at different places in our lives. But, we all have the same number of hours in the day, and we all have the opportunity to make choices and changes. Our opportunity to spend time is our opportunity to produce change and progress, and those who are ten years behind but are focused and disciplined and know all of this can easily outpace people ten years ahead of them who don’t know any of this in a year or less. People are quick to think that success is made up of some fortune only bestowed to some, better situations with more advantages. No. Success is built from focus, action, and reflection, and the speed of success and the exponential nature of success that builds and compounds massively in a very short amount of time is something that is anyone’s to seize.
We’re human beings, not machines…
The degree to which a person is successful and to which their success grows is rooted not just in their actions and choices and activities, but primarily in the balance of their time. The reason that some people are more successful with their time than others has a lot to do with how they spend it. Sure, it comes down to the individual choices that they make, the things they do, etc, but their ability to make those choices and do all of those things depends ultimately upon their mental, physical, and emotional energy, stamina, or endurance. Unlike computers, we’re not plugged into the wall, an endless supply of energy. We fatigue over time, and we need variety. While the choices we make, the beliefs we have, the perspectives we carry and view our world with have a lot to do with our energy and how we react to life from moment to moment, and some people have greater endurance than others, we all need balance when it comes to our time to restore our energy.
Work / Play / Rest
I first came upon the idea of this division in 2019, about a year after I’d taken a job with a 50-hour-per-week shcedule. In the midst of trying to manage the job, a side hustle, time to commute, eat, take care of myself, have some social life, and get plenty of rest, I realized that I’d gotten myself into a situation where compromise was inevitable. I made a quick inventory of all the things I did / wanted to do in a day, and divided them up into categories to try to plot out my time and see where I might be wasting time on one thing that could be better allocated to another thing. In the process of doing this, I realized just what a challenge it was to fit all of these things in, and went over a comparison chart of my previous 40-hour-work-week lifestyle, and how I spent my time then, when, admittedly, life was more enjoyable. At that same time, I became very interested in studies on the effects of standard work weeks, four-day-work-weeks, working from home, jobs where you can take naps, jobs without hourly requirements, and how they affected employees, as well as things like how much sleep we actually need per night to function. Over the next few months, unable to experiment with many variables surrounding my job, I began to experiment with changing the amount of sleep I got, modifying how long, how often, and when I worked on my side hustle, and how much time I spent in the evnings and on the weekend engaged in pursuits of pleasure. I also kept a grip on my emotional response to all of this, what made me feel accomplished, at peace, anxious, and every other feeling out there.
What I came to realize is that productivity, happiness, progress, success, fulfillment, they all work hand in hand with one another. Certain tasks and activites require a certain type of energy that other activities tend to restore. I could spend several hours doing something and end up feeling just totally and completely exhausted, mentally and emotionally, and then put it down for the night and spend an hour doing something else and feel totally revived. The point is that for people who want to accomplish a lot with their time, your need for balance between work, play, and rest is of utmost importance. When I made that inventory of activities earlier, I scanned over it and I thought “what are the categories I could lump this all into”? My thought was “if I’m here working this much each day in this block, and I need this big of a block of sleep, how much time do I have to, oh, say just sit back and enjoy life a little? Work was an obvious one, as was play, and when rest came along, it just seled the deal.
You cannot run on an empty tank. You can try to schedule time for each of these things, but I find that the best thing is to remain open and free with your allocation of time, and simply remain mondful of the need for a healthy split, what that split typically looks like, and to remain self-aware in the moments of your day about how you feel, and when it might be a good time to shift. People who do pomodoros, and other time and task-management techniques realize the importance of this, and the cognitive and processing limits of the brain. People who are aware of mental fatigue and the effects of it are also tuned into the importance of all of this.
Money
Simply having money does not equal happiness. Happiness is a choice – one that doesn’t depend on money – but it’s a choice that is made easier when we are keeping up with ourselves, our desires for expansion, the fulfillment of our sense of purpose, and our journey through life – and money is integral to the trade of goods and services produced by others, goods and services that enable us to work together, to help one another meaningfully advance in life.
Happiness is a choice, one that is made much easier with money. This is so, because we are growth-oriented beings. We’re constantly expanding, having new thoughts, ideas, seeing and experiencing new things. How much money it takes to make a person happy depends on a lot of things, and isn’t something any of us can really pass judgement on. Money, however, is the byproduct of time well-spent and choices wisely-made, and can buy time back, and literally any thing you could ever need, and therefore, can procure happiness. Money is not happiness, but it can and does help us live a happy life.
Debt
Education
TEBEARS Mechanism
Success is a state of being. That’s how we look at it on The Study Of Success. It’s a state that is provided for by a constant state of progress and forward motion. That forward motion is something that is no accident, but rather a very exact result of a series of actions. In understanding success, one of my first isolations was that all success is built off of the wise and useful use of time. People who are successful don’t necessarily have more time than people who are unsuccessful, especially not always in the beginning. They just make different decisions. And even where there is a huge deficit of free time, due to job, family, or other types of obligations, there is still enough time to make decisions that can begin to alter the course of the vessel that is our destiny.
Once that I had isolated time out as the foundation on which success is built, I realized that it is not how much time, but what we do with the time that determines our futures. To most of you, I’m sure that last statement may come across as a very trite statement of the obvious; but bear with me, let’s keep going. In order to understand what led to drastically different situations, I backtracked through the apparent cause and effect relationships. All the money; what did they DO that resulted in it flowing into their existence? People often throw their hands up in the air and say it’s luck or they had a better start or they had better opportunities.
No. All that is, is an insult to our own abilities and the opportunities we are literally drowning in every day, a pessimistic and shallow pity party we’ve all attended before. Every moment is an opportunity to do this, or that, or any number of other things; the direction and path that our day forks in, an idea that brings the following Robert Frost quote to mind, is what makes the difference between $1 and $1,000, happiness and sadness, a surplus of energy and motivation or a complete deficit of it. The average person makes _____ decisions per day, think of what a difference it would make if even 10% of those were consciously made to lead you in a different direction?
Determined to find the source and origin of the decisions that propelled them to where they are, I went very deep, in some cases, and identified what I’m calling a process of thought, of cognition, of the mind processing what it perceives and what is around it and making decisions about its next course of action, a “mechanism” if you will. This mechanism started out rather small, and grew over time as I came to understand how it’s really just a feedback loop with several steps.
TEBEARA Mechanism
Thought / Experience > Belief / Perspective > Emotion > Action > Result > Analysis
The concept behind this is that all results come from an action, which in most cases is predicated by an emotional response, a suggested action if you will to a thought, idea, or experiencing of something, and that action is based upon our beliefs and perspective and what feels right.
To put it another way, when we have a thought, an impulse, an idea, or experience something, any impulse to do something as a result of it involves that we make a decision on how to react based upon our beliefs or our perspective, which results in an emotional response urging us toward a decision based on what feels best, which in most cases will result in an action taken, and a result or effect will occur.
Occasionally, we will override the suggestion our emotional response to a situation gives us with a logical decision instead, doing something even though it doesn’t feel right, because we know it’s the right thing to do, acknowledging in part that our beliefs and perspective are in need of some finessing on that subject.
We can narrow this whole mechanism down even further, if needed, to see that all it really amounts to is an impulse, which is then interpreted mostly subjectively but occasionally objectively, and answered with a reaction, which produces a response from the environment.
Most people will understand this, and will agree with the premise of it, yet not fully comprehend and have sink in the fact that this is literally the basis of all stagnation; the short-circuiting of this mechanism. All things, literally everything, rests upon the thoughts that we think, the beliefs that we develop that work in a sense as our conscious and subconscious decision-making framework – our cognitive autopilot, if you will – and how the one and only road toward change is through the modification of our beliefs and actions.
The interesting thing is that the degree to which we are successful depends upon – among other things like the balance of time and maintaining our mental, physical, and emotional endurance – the degree to which we fully participate in the loop. It’s key to have plenty of fuel to run the engine, but also that the engine runs properly, all parts working as they should. Many people develop short circuits. That is, they get to a certain point, and instead of following the loop to the finish and back to the beginning, they get to a certain point, most commonly to ______, and then skip some of the most crucial parts of this loop – often due to what seems like frustration, but really is more likely mental and emotional fatigue from ineffectively processing their world, and a desire to just be done with something as quick as possible – and skip the whole refinement and adaptation stages that are what we really need to get from where we are to where we want to be.
In the same way that money does not equal happiness, action does not equal progress. Action is a component of progress, just as money is a component of happiness, but unless action and money are used in a manner that is appropriate to the situation, their expenditure will yield nothing. It was this realization, and the uncovering of the many stages of this mechanism that led me to believe that this is one of the key roadbloacks to success and happiness. In fact, out of the whole mechanism, I would say that the following are the stages of cognition that give us the most trouble
Common Weak Points for Decision-Making
- Beliefs – we are so insanely bound and tied to our beliefs. It’s rooted in how our minds operate – confirmation bias and all of that
- Thoughts and Ideas – we are often so busy doing and trying to bring about progress that we don’t spend any time simply opening our minds and considering and learning things. Part of that is due to the whole collegiate system and the educational systme as a whole drowning people through societal shaming and influence into an excessive period of over-education in their youth, to the point where people either think they’ve learned all they need to, and / or have come to associate learning with regurgitation and negative memories and all kinds of other things. Alternatively, we also don’t bring in the right thoughts and ideas. We are so tech-focused, and over-strimulated, and much of our exhausiton and inability to focus comes from being constantly bombarded with information, and not useful stuff either. We don’t always have to be thinking and processing in a useful manner, but we should remain mindful of what’s getting our attention and whether or not we’re feeding our minds, or just schlepping fodder in to keep ourselves entertained. And also whether or not the thoughts and ideas we read build us up or pull us down. Get rid of news
- Analysis – too many of us just let things happen. People accept what happens and say that not everything is in our control. This is true to a certain degree, but what is 1000% in our control is what we do in the future. If you cannot control the outcome of a situation, you certainly can control your reaction to it. You can also change what led you to this outcome; the belief / perspective that elicited the emotional reaction that made you choose the choice you did. If you can clearly see that the choice you made could’ve been better, even though it felt like the right choice to make at the time, we can sit back and think about why we made that decision, if it was rooted in logic or more in an emotional / feeling place, and determine why we felt that way, and work to change that belief or perspective by seeking new experiences and ideas. The most tremendously successful people I have observed and read about are not the ones that made fantastic decisions and always won, but rather, the ones who were willing to fail and then sit back and consider what led to the failure, and how they could change things in the future to affect a different result. They don’t take the effects of the world and their life personally, they see that they are much more in control than most people realize. Even though there’s so much validity to it, the recommendation that we learn to love failure has become a very trite, tacky, cliche, meaningless saying, because it lacks context to give it meaning.
Time is our drawing board for success. Some people draw wonderful elaborate castles. Some people doodle. Some people draw the same thing over and over again. What I find that separates the miserable from the complacent, and even from the successful is how their drawing evolve and grow.
Career
Our career is at the very basis of who we are, our success, and our fulfillment. It’s the block of time that does more to make our entire lives – professional, family, personal, etc – a success than anything else. It’s what helps us provide for ourselves and for others. It’s what gives us meaning. And sadly, in our modern world where our careers stress us out, we are all about downplaying the importance of our careers and making it into that small, rarely-discussed, pesky sideline item that we’re always looking for a way to escape.