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Be carefull, Success may not be all that you expect

Written by: Andrew Campbell-Watt

Article Overview: We all strive to be successful. But what is success? How is it rated or determined? How has your success been achieved? Has it been at any cost, to others or to yourself? The danger, today, is that success, almost exclusively, has now come to mean achievement in a particular field of endeavour. Success, for you, may be a collection of exquisite material items and great financial wealth; or to be in a position of power and influence. The trouble is that anything that is external to you can be lost. Hence the requirement for insurance, security guards, fencing, keys and locks, and for those with power and influence – minders to watch their backs! Lasting success is internal. It is contentment and being happy with yourself.

Be carefull, Success may not be all that you expect

We all strive to be successful. But what is success? How is it rated or determined? How has your success been achieved? Has it been at any cost, to others or to yourself?

The danger, today, is that success, almost exclusively, has now come to mean achievement in a particular field of endeavour. Success, for you, may be a collection of exquisite material items and great financial wealth; or to be in a position of power and influence. The trouble is that anything that is external to you can be lost. Hence the requirement for insurance, security guards, fencing, keys and locks, and for those with power and influence – minders to watch their backs! Lasting success is internal. It is contentment and being happy with yourself.

Is your world your work? Is your research, your - anything – different, or better than mine because it is more important, unique, because you are unique and more important than I am? Are you stuck in a ‘silo’ mentality? Anything inside your ‘silo’ is ok, outside it is not? It behoves you to be careful, you may get what you ask for!

Success is not, ever, a result solely, of individual effort. It is always a result of co-operative, collective effort; from detailed preparation and planning, and of course, most important of all being in the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunity.

The trap, in believing that you are the only reason for your success, however you define it, is that you may be deluded into thinking that all misfortune is external, and that failure, or lack of success, is ‘not my fault’. This in turn may become, “I am important, different, better than you, all my success is because I know best – I am good”. This delusion reinforces the ‘silo’ mentality, leads to alienation from others, to stress and a distinct lack of harmony in life generally, and the work place in particular. As a Human Being, can you then be considered a ‘success’?

A dramatic example of unfettered desire for ‘success’ and the danger in dismissing others and the inevitable consequences as irrelevant, is related by Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst:

“A lady came into my office. She refused to give her name, said it did not matter, since she wished to have only one consultation. It was apparent that she belonged to the upper levels of society. She had been a doctor, she said. What she had to communicate to me was a confession; some twenty years ago she had committed a murder out of jealousy. She had murdered her best friend because she wanted to marry the friend’s husband. She had thought that if the murder was not discovered, it would not disturb her. She wanted to marry the husband, and the simplest way was to eliminate her friend. Moral considerations were of no importance to her, she thought.

The consequences? She had in fact, married the man, but he had died soon afterwards, relatively young. During the following years a number of strange things happened. The daughter of this marriage endeavoured to get away from her as soon as she was grown up. She married young and vanished from view, drew farther and farther away, and ultimately the mother lost all contact with her.

This lady was a passionate horse woman and owned several riding horses of which she was extremely fond. One day she discovered that the horses were beginning to grow nervous under her. Even her favourite shied and threw her. Finally she had to give up riding. There after she clung to her dogs. She owned an unusually beautiful wolfhound to which she was greatly attached. As chance would have it, this very dog was stricken with paralysis. With that her cup was full; she felt that she was morally done for. She had to confess, and for this purpose she came to me. She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys his (sic) own soul. The murderer has already passed sentence on himself. If someone has committed a crime and is caught, he suffers judicial punishment. If it is done secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him, as our case shows. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even the animals and plants ‘know it’.

As a result of the murder, the woman, was plunged into an unbearable loneliness. She had even become alienated from animals....She had seen people and animals turn away from her, and had been so struck by this silent verdict that she could not have endured any further condemnation.” (C.G. Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections, 1963. Recorded and edited by Aniele Jaffe).

Jung never found out who she was, nor if he story was true. But he doubted that she could have gone on living in that utter loneliness.

While I hope and trust that no one who reads this will ever find themselves in such a situation, it does illustrate, graphically, the point I am trying to make, that success at any price has a cost. The Law of Cause and Effect cannot be evaded, cannot be denied. We can duck and weave and justify our actions in any way we please – to no avail.

Recall however that the woman in the story related above achieved “success’, she achieved what she set out to do, she married ‘her’ man. She forgot the fact that she was dealing with human beings and that she was also human – she could not divorce herself from Humanity. She got what she asked for!! She was also totally amoral.

Morality is inextricably linked to virtue and ethics. It lifts us human beings out of our self-centred existence and allows us to play our part in a wider field. It enables us to recognize that others are also players in the game of life. It also teaches us that making money, or acquiring material goods, or getting our own way, is not the sole reason for life on earth.

The poets often get it right. John Donne, (1572 – 1631), penned the famous lines (actually from one of his sermons, not a poem):
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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Article Tags: alienatio, contentment, endeavour, fencing, for whom the bell tolls, insurance, keys and locks, minders, power and influence, security guards, success



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