Success When You Don't Care
- Advoco
- Sep 11, 2020
- 2 min read
One of my favorite quotes is from Austrian psychologist Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. As someone who has often struggled in his own search for meaning, as I’m sure everyone experiences at one point or another, I’ve found his words to be so simplistic yet so inspiring.
The quote goes as follows:
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
It sounds kind of crazy doesn’t it? “Success happens when you stop caring about it.”
I think what Viktor is trying to say is that we spend so much time in our lives chasing after this idea of success, we lose sight of what’s important. We spend so much time trying to shape our careers into some semblance of success, whatever our definitions of the term may be, that we forget to enjoy the small things that life has to offer. The things that often mean the most but get overlooked the most. We forget to dedicate our time and ourselves to someone other than us.
We may have the job or the car or whatever else, but does it really make us happy? After spending all that time chasing, is it really what we wanted?
We have to be able to dedicate ourselves to something or someone greater than us, and only then will we experience true success. We have to let it happen, and not because we chased after it, but because we forgot to think about it.
Until next time…we are Advoco, make every minute count.
About Josh: Josh Pruitt is the man behind the camera at Advoco. He’s the one who takes photos of our team, produces our videos, and runs our webinars. If there’s a camera involved, you’ll find Josh there! When he’s not in the office, Josh likes to build computers and crush his friends at video games. Have a question for Josh? Send him an email!
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