Success, without happiness is no success

It’s good to be successful and wealthy from it. But if that success has come without happiness, it is not really success at all.

So it might be a worthy exploration, to understand why people become unhappy, and how you can avoid those pitfalls. You see there is a blueprint for being happy.

The first step might be to realise that you are 100% in control of this topic of happiness. However, we start to develop habits of blaming others for our unhappiness, and once we do that happiness becomes like a snow leopard in Nepal. Unfortunately, this is also a one-way street, because the more we blame others for our unhappiness, the more unhappy we get, and the more we struggle to find happiness, and the minute we try to struggle to find happiness. It gets harder to find. Just like the snow leopard in Nepal.

It is therefore, a worthy exercise to take the time to write down who you blame, and who you lean on for your happiness. Sometimes it’s not a who, but a what you lean on for your happiness. So you might want to write down a few things that you lean on for your happiness.

True happiness is that state of being that remains steadfast, regardless of circumstances. No, this is a very high spiritual state of being in the world and many people aim for it using the same techniques they used previously when they lent on blamed or needed things to go right to be happy. And so there is even confusion in the western model of how to achieve this unconditional state of happiness.

Let’s just remember here that we want success, but we also want happiness at the same time. And that is absolutely totally 100% possible, but it is not possible when we blame or lean on things for happiness.

Innerwealth is that state of happiness. It is achievable and it is sustainable through some of the darkest hours. Innerwealth is sometimes tested by calamities disasters or humbling circumstances. But those are also mechanisms to grow Innerwealth. And so the process of remaining happy regardless of what takes place around us is a journey.

The first step on that journey is to realise that you are blaming, or leaning on things outside of yourself for your happiness, and that is not working perfectly. I will give you a short summary as to why leaning on things and blaming others for disrupting your happiness is a broken process, even though it may be part of your model of life.

Let’s reiterate hear that nobody wants to achieve success without happiness. But happiness is not the mechanism of achieving success. You can achieve success as an unhappy person. We have seen all too many people in business, and in sport achieve great success in a very unhappy state of mind blaming others and leaning on things for that happiness. But we can also witness the cost of such a process. When success is achieved by a person who is unhappy within themselves. The rewards of that success do not last very long.

You can also witness this in the small scale, when you see people come home from work to their families in an unhappy state of mind and try to gain happiness vicariously through the family. They blame and lean on others at home to repair the mind set that has developed during the working day. The result of this is conspicuous and I don’t need to elaborate.

Why, leaning on things and blaming people does not work to cause sustainable happiness, while building success.

You may have from time to time, heard the argument about the difference between religion and spirituality. Simplified, religion builds a model of behaviour based on some principles of ethics that drive people to be socially and culturally safe. In contrast, spirituality tries to explain how to be in the world as a unique individual and yet do no harm. Ultimately, they are both approaching one topic from to polar opposite positions. The language used in spirituality and religion is extremely different, but the objective of people operating as their best self and not doing harm in the world is similar.

So I am only going to talk from the spiritual view point. In order to find sustainable happiness that goes hand-in-hand with success, we must take responsibility for the way we think, and the way we see the world around us. Sometimes this shift conflicts with beliefs that have been held onto for a very long time, and therefore the process of seeing things differently is also the process of thinking differently. This does not have to be a conflict.

It is the same as watching a game of football. You can watch this game as a team supporter with biased hopes that your team wins the game and therefore that the referee makes judgements in your favour or you can watch the game as the referee. The bias of a supporter is understandable, the bias of the players is also understandable because they want to win the game. But the referee must see the game unbiased. So there are two parts of you. The player in the game biased in its viewpoint and the referee. And it’s the referee that we will focus on in order to find this state of mind, so elusive, called happiness.

So, firstly, let’s look at the game from the players point of view, or the supporters point of view. The players want to win and beat the competition. That ultimately will require them to be superior in performance and get the luck of the game. They will want to play whatever tricks and skills they can use to cause the ball to get to the goal. While playing they try to avoid injury so that they can continue to play next time and they want to be remunerated for their performance, either in the form of accolade, or in the form of financial payment. That’s no different to every day. Life filled with emotions, exploring opportunities for new jobs and doing our level. Best to put the ball through the goal which may be simply to pay the bills and keep the kids at school. Everybody will define those goals differently. These players lean on each other and blame each other if things go wrong and take credit when things go right. Therefore their state of happiness can fluctuate depending on whether the ball gets to the goal and whether they feel they did their best. It’s pretty much a game of Roulette.

Now let’s step back a bit and watch the same game as the referee. There are a bunch of players on the field, all of which want to win, but not every one of them can win. Those players have positive and negative qualities and a referee would never lean on any of them to do their job. Whether the blue team wins all the green team wins, the referee has no investment and is therefore detached from the result of the game. If a player gets injured, the referee stops the game until they are cleared from the field, but it makes no difference to the referee that one of the teams lost their best player. The referee has a home and the family, but that has nothing to do with the game. There are very few supporters in the crowd for the referee. The crowd has a different agenda. Therefore, the referee recognises that they are alone, and they alone are responsible for how they feel while playing the game. The referee will also have a trophy on their shelf called success that they achieved the status of refereeing a great game of football. But their emotional engagement during the game was zero. They just needed to remain in a steady state that kept them alert, focused, wise, and on target for the end of the time. That’s pretty much what it looks like through the eyes of Innerwealth.

In contrast to what most people think you can be both the referee of the game of your life and a player in it. But this is where the source of happiness must become really clear. If you are the player and you are biased and want things to go your way and are leaning on others and blaming other things, then your happiness will fluctuate, remarkably.

So lets talk about this “sustainable, unconditional, permanent, happiness.” And the blue print.

1. You’ve already got it.
2. Stress hides it.
3. Calm reveals it
4. Thinking clouds it.
5. Judging others avoids it.
6. Winning doesn’t change it.
7. Loosing doesn’t change it.
8. When we lose track of it, we panic.
9. Attaching it to someone or something is a panic attack.

So, to achieve success with happiness you are going to have to manage those 8 things that can cause you to loose your natural happiness and do more of those things that cause that natural, powerful, sustainable happiness to be on the surface.

That’s the first 5 minutes – and in the next 5 minutes … hahahaha

Now, what do all the 8 things that can cause you to loose your natural happiness have in common?

One thing….

Emotion.

What is an emotion? 

Emotions are lopsided thoughts. A thought that is not balanced is an emotion, or at least, causes an emotion. All emotions are lopsided thoughts. So, the entanglement of the 8 distractions into the world of happiness is purely emotional. The more emotional a person is, the more they are choosing to have lopsided thoughts.

Lopsided thoughts are your beliefs and their correlated expectations.

There is a minefield of beliefs in you. Some, work for you and some don’t. Most, you inherited from your ancestry. Your parents and theirs and theirs etc. Some, are inherited from the environment you were exposed to up to the age of four or five. That is the time when your permanent intrinsic and extrinsic values were created. They’ll never change.

Nobody wants success without happiness. A few people want happiness without success. And each of us defines success based on those early childhood values we created. Life has a funny way of organically, and naturally guiding us to the values success we want. Simply, we sabotage anything that gets in the way of it. A very powerful, organic and natural process of following our true path.

So, now you have two things to consider. Happiness which has it’s natural roots within you, and does not really require any success or effort, and success, which, through your values, drives you to be or do or have something in life. Two independent forces. And yet, how many people can say they separate them? Most people think, “Success will make me happy” and “if I’m happy I’ll be more successful.” Both of which are not true at all. 

Temporary happiness, the upper we get from a spike of success or a shot of vodka or a can of coke, or marriage or a kiss, is hey, functional part of success. But it is temporary. It does get validated by the links between feeling good and achieving success.

So piece by piece, here, we are distilling down the process of achieving success and the process of achieving sustainable happiness, and what we are being very clear to demonstrate is that they follow to very different roads. Success is achieved through motivation. Happiness is achieved through inspiration. Both are essential if we want to make something of our lives. And they can’t function simultaneously.

Let’s talk a little bit about success.

As we mentioned earlier your values that are created in the first five years of your life will determine how you define success. That’s success, whether it is simply a matter of making money or building a family or climbing Mount Everest, requires that you are motivated strongly toward the thing that you are most interested in achieving. All motivation comes from a sense of a vacuum. There is a gap between where you are, and where you would love to be and what you perceive to be the achievement of success and what comes with it. The bigger the gap as long as you have some degree of self belief and motivational psychology. Going on, the more strongly you are motivated to deal with the challenges of achieving success. There is a blueprint for success.

As we also mentioned earlier success does not automatically bring with it, the happiness that most of us thought it would. The search for happiness is quite often one of the primary values in that first, five years of our lives that we put up on a pedestal as being an outcome of our life that we will treasure. Therefore, the ambition to achieve success, as a high value is also often associated with the ambition to be happy. And this is where your beliefs kick in because there are many philosophies that suggest that if you are happy you will be successful, least you can define yourself as successful because you are happy. That is called religion in its many and diverse forms.

When there is promise of happiness that comes as a consequence of doing something such as behaving in a certain way, or being a certain type of person, or achieving a certain type of gold, you can immediately know that it is the bait that creates motivation and happiness that is being offered is extremely temporary. All depression and frustration comes as a consequence of trying to achieve happiness as a consequence of doing something or achieving something.

The benefit of this is motivation. Motivation is the drive and the resilience to get you through the tough times of achieving something successfully. Nobody achieved something without the grind and the grit of motivation.

So, now that you can see how easy it is to load success with so much luggage, including emotional feelings and outcomes, that it becomes more than just the summit of Mount Everest, or achieving something in business, it becomes the absolute critical variable in the entirety of a life. In other words, this individual who is highly motivated, can also be loading happiness, fulfilment, and many other of life’s emotional variables into the achievement of success. When we load success with so many different variables, it becomes heavy, and we become extremely attached to achieving that success, and when we become attached to achieving that success, the odds of achieving success, go down in a negative direction. Our decisions in our choices and our operating in the environment of success start to become extreme and we make absolutely unravel what could have been an easy path.

Nothing reveals this more than the process of goalsetting. The whole ideal of goalsetting is to Stripaway, the emotion and baggage that is attached to achieving things. But for many people, as soon as they, Stripaway, the emotion and the gratification of achievement, there are just the dry bones of a relatively boring life, just labelled on a sheet of paper to give some validation, and to a certain degree motivation to get up in the morning. So it becomes really obvious in the goalsetting process when we strip out all the baggage attached to success that very often the hopes and dreams of people who prefer not to write down, their goals are very emotional.

Going back to our earlier metaphor, the player on the field can be very emotionally loaded as long as there is a coach on the sidelines directing play, and as long as there is a referee who is not emotionally engaged the game will have some resemblance of order. But the more emotionally loaded, the player becomes with winning. The more likely it is they will make errors and they will tighten up under pressure and not play at the very best when it is most needed. I always feel incredible pain for the individual who in the World Cup has to kick that ball in the kick off at the end of the game to see who wins, but misses the ball and loses the entire game for the team because they tried to hard.

Given that success is not just a single pointed target, but can be inclusive of quite a spectrum of life. For example, an individual might say, I want to achieve business success, as well as have a family, as well as have financial success, as well as have friends as well as be healthy. And each one of these comes with potential to lean on, or blame others for unhappiness there becomes a complex mix. To stay motivated, the individual must control all the positive and negative feedback that come from all the things that they lean on, or blame for their happiness. As well as every other emotion, they may be, including in the outcome of their success story. These are what is called expectations.

The other aspect of success, which is really important to understand is that as we achieve one level of success, it gives birth to 2 more. If when we start a business, we make a pact with ourselves to achieve $100,000 of profit, when we do achieve that it automatically makes success $200,000 of profit, plus more and more. So the ambition to achieve some level of emotional gratification from achieving success, seems to be proven time and time again to be a fruitless campaign. Whatever we achieve can always be achieved better. Nobody wants less.

And so, rather than define success as a single outcome, it’s wiser to call it life. Life itself is the ambition to be motivated to achieve success, and that success is defined only by the individual. For one person would be considered, a failure is for another person, the ultimate of success. What we thought would be successful when we were 20 years old looks ridiculous from the viewpoint of our 40-year-old self. The reason is that each time we achieve something. It creates a new possibility and a new definition of success, but it also reveals that we reframe what we call success for the entirety of our life.

What we can take from this is that as we mature in years, and we experience success in all its different micro levels, we start the process also of stripping away, the emotions we attached to success. Therefore, success can become more emotionless, and our goalsetting can become more powerful, the more we achieve. Experience brings with it the knowledge that we cannot manage anything we have emotion about. Experience also teaches us that the more we lean on others or blame others for our happiness. The more likely it is that our success will collapse because we have loaded the emotions of happiness and dependency together with success. People can reject our expectations.

Now let’s talk a little bit more about happiness.

The one thing that religion and spirituality have in common, is the quest for happiness. Whether you are in a Christian church, or a synagogue or a monastery in the Himalayas, you will find one thing they all share in common. And that is gratitude. Where’s of the congregation is chanting Tibetan mantra, or singing by him, or praying from a book everything leads to that one state of mind, which is grateful. They also have one other thing in common about that search for gratitude, and that is, it is always for something beyond the self. In traditional Buddhism and Zen, one is always taught to meditate or pray for the well-being of others never the self.

From this, it can be seen that whether we are seeking happiness, sustainably, or success sustainability or both, gratitude is going to be a very big variable in the whole shooting match.

Now we can explore the differences. In motivation, we are grateful for the things that go right and not grateful for the things that go wrong. In motivation, we are trying to fix things that go wrong so that they don’t go wrong again, we are trying to modify the behaviour of the people we lean on so that we can be grateful for them and we are trying to adjust the variables of the things that we blame so that they go away and we can achieve what we want and stay. Thankful.

Inspiration on the other hand, is being grateful for both the things that go right and things that go wrong, knowing that the only difference between these is our belief system, and the expectations that come from it, and that the only thing we can really change to sustain happiness within ourselves is our belief system, and therefore our expectation.

There is a dire conflict between the process of modifying the world, so we can be grateful for it and leaving the world alone and working out where our own belief systems are out of sync with the nature of the universe, and modifying our belief systems so that we can be grateful even for those things we didn’t ask for or want.

Big difference, here is how much we blame or lean on others to be compliant so that we can be happy.

My next door neighbour has one of the loudest leaf blowers available to the human race. His property is approximately 5 m² of grass and every Saturday he spends a minimum of 1 to 2 hours blowing leaves around this tiny patch of grass rather than use a rake. I think the reason is that there is dog poo in that grass and he wants to keep away from it. I’m not sure of his consciousness around this topic, but this has been going on now for at least seven years and he even use this leaf blower on the morning of Christmas to prepare for a family barbecue. This is just a small example of motivation versus inspiration because one part of me wants to go over there and give him a verbal serve about his inconsiderate behaviour, and the other part of me is trying to find the benefit of living next door to this rowdy noisy leaf blower man. I have a really clear motto in my life, and that is to pick your fights. In other words, sometimes we make more problems trying to modify other people rather than to modify how we see them. I’m pretty sure if I broke this subject with him, he is not going to take it as a compliment and I may even exacerbate the problem. So, rather than feeling this in powered and weak by, not addressing this, I’m confronted with the idea that I can be grateful if I change my expectation of him and the noise and the leaf blower and find in someway away to be grateful for it.

Another easy example is that I had a client who was screaming mad about the government not doing enough about global warning. As a result of global warming in his mind, and therefore blaming the government for his unhappiness, the bushfires had burnt through his property and destroyed his old heritage shack. The ownership of the shack obviously represented some level of success for him, and the enjoyment of the property, gave him some temporary feelings of happiness, and therefore was part of his gratitude for life. But when it burnt down so did he, so it is obvious that he was leaning on it, or blaming it or depending on it for his gratitude. I tried to offer a different viewpoint of the burn down, but he was not interested. He was so invested in the definition of success that he had and that the bushfires had burnt through it, and he needed someone to blame, and the government became the someone. Four weeks he walked around, angry typing on his Facebook account how much he resented and hated the government because they had not done enough about global warming and blaming the entire bushfires on the government for not doing enough about global warming.

About a year later, I spoke to him, and he was complaining that the regrowth was really hard to get through to build a new house which was covered by insurance and was going to be fireproof and safer for his family and better. Suddenly, the topic of global warming, and the rainforest burning down, and the government incompetence had shifted to another topic, which was the British royalty. The habit of blaming something or leaning on something for happiness is also the habit of blaming something, and leaning on something for unhappiness. This is a pathway to success. Many people take, but they’ve bundled happiness and emotional fulfilment in with their success. There’s clouds judgement. There’s clouds decisions this clouds work, productivity, it cloud so much of success and loads at far too heavily with an emotional burden. But it is common and actually is probably the mindset of the majority.

To find that natural internal organic state of happiness that every single person inherits from their soul, we must be able to disempower emotions, which means question our beliefs, and we must set as a target for ourselves to remain grateful for everything that happens no matter whether it fits with our expectations or not. In other words, emotions are the invader of true, human, natural happiness. And those emotions are vital for success. And so we have the story of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Bible, Buddha, and every other aspect of spiritual quest, wrapped up in a small realisation. The enemy is ourselves and our emotions which come from our beliefs and breed our expectations.

The separation between success and emotion starts to unfold when a person realises that the more they lean on, and blame others for their happiness the more they repel love. Ultimately, at some point, we get to realise that the value that is driving, our success is the desire at some level for love. And blaming and leaning on others, for that love is the corruption of our happiness.

It is, therefore the essential nature of a human being to one-day, try to separate materialism and success, possession, attachment, and all of the things, one thought would cause happiness from the real path to happiness, which is within. And although in commercial sales of spiritual paradigms, many people try to link the internal path to happiness with success, they are mutually exclusive. They are mutually exclusive in causation, but a person who achieve success without happiness, has not achieved any form of success at all, even in their own paradigm.

Conclusion

The path to success is therefore academic. It is a blueprint. However, once success is loaded with the emotional baggage of an individuals, belief systems that are locked down and unchanging, the path to success becomes a tortured path of emotional upheaval and disruption. A battle within.

Contrasting this, the path to true happiness, which can run parallel to the path to success is also a blueprint. If true happiness is organic and natural and not a right that is earned through behaviour, compliance or achievement, then the path to true happiness must be natural as well.

What sits at the border between true happiness and success is emotion, and that emotion is derived by each and every individual from their own particular belief systems, which create their own particular expectations. If those beliefs systems don’t change, then the battle to achieve happiness and success will either defer to one or the other, but cannot integrate both.

Innerwealth technology clearly demonstrates that both success and natural organic sustainable happiness can coexist. One can be filled with love for what they have, and who they are surrounded by as well, as filled with expectation and anticipation that drives success. There is no need to sacrifice one to the other, but there is a need to recognise when the two are in a battle and to know how to sort this out.

In the next article, I will discuss the natural organic process of sustaining happiness, without sabotaging success.