HOW TO MANIFEST SUCCESS
I have a semi-serious addiction these days, one that I’m a little ashamed to admit.
I’m addicted to scratch cards.
I simply cannot get enough of them. The anticipation as I scratch, scratch, scratch away at these colourful pieces of paper designed to instantly gratify or instantly disappoint is too much for me to resist.
I love the little hits of dopamine that allow me to momentarily avoid the fact at hand: that success comes from the inside, not the outside. And that no amount of money - won or earned - can change that.
What does success mean to you?
How tied is your definition of success to what you’re doing with your time versus how much you’re being compensated?
Where does compensation in the material realm fit in with your definition?
What does success look like if not in the material?
Lots of questions to consider when thinking about the multifaceted nature of what it means to be successful.
There's no such thing as perfect, just as there’s no such thing as being able to fill the void with something external even if you did manage to reach perfection. You still have to live with yourself and the knowledge that you’re going to die one day and can’t take anything with you.
When you start manifesting success in the material world you soon find that nothing is ever enough.
“Whatever has the nature of arising has the nature of ceasing.” ~The Buddha
Speaking of the Buddha, the entire concept of Buddhism was built on the Universal truth, that Life is Suffering (with a capital S).
You could be at the pinnacle of material success; you could have a pool bigger than Kanye’s, the partner of your dreams, a bunch of kids who were born sleeping full nights and never crying.
And then one of those babies could wake up with leukemia. You could wake up and realize something was off and have the doctor tell you you’re losing your eyesight, your hearing, your kidneys aren’t working. The stock market could crash. Your city could be hit by floods, wiping out your business, your friend’s homes, your Kanye-sized pool!
Or, you could wake up one day and look around you and feel as though something was missing.
You could wake up one day and have it hit you harder than ever before that you’re going to die one day.
And let’s say the path you had been on your entire life wasn’t a righteous one.
What if your fortune was build on the backs of factory workers in Pakistan, China, the Philippines.
Or environment-destroying machines.
Or the exploitation of the elderly, children or minorities.
And you woke up and realized that the time you’ve spent working to become materially successful has actively made the world a worse place to live in.
Could success, therefore, be redefined by the end of suffering?
No more suffering = success.
When you think about it that way, success is exponential.
If you define success as something material, you’ll eventually hit a wall. There will be no more things to buy. There will be no more land to conquer.
But if we look at success as the end of suffering, we realize that there is very little that we actually need to do in order to achieve success. You raise the collective consciousness when you treat every moment with kindness and compassion and seek the end of suffering for all mankind.
The feeling is turned inwards and becomes shared.
The best part of this is that your life ends up getting easier. You approach work from a place of calm, pure enjoyment, rather than a frantic racing.
You attract things, opportunities, people and experiences that mirror your energy. Everything gets groovier.
When you find success in every day, in every person, in every thing, then people and places, objects and experiences are no longer items on a long list of things you have to conquer.
What about you? What do you think about success? How does it manifest in your life?