Lesson 1. How to look back on where you have been.

Lesson 1. How to look back on where you have been.

No one else can live your life for you. No one else can succeed for you. You are in the business of living. You never do anything harder in your life than leaving your parents.

2. Howard Whitman. How to Fashion your own brand of success.

The “ice cream” of success is your own inward knowledge of it and it varies from individual to individual as personality varies. It springs from the very depths where personality itself arises, and it takes insight to find out for ourselves what our own ideas of success actually are.

Too often we conform to the outside world in our success and happiness patterns without thought or analysis.

William Faulkner, the Nobel prize novelist said, “I was born to be a tramp. I was happiest when I had nothing.”

George Sand wrote, “One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness.

Happiness is no vague dream, but is composed of intangible personal values stemming from a mature philosophy.

When Mahatma Gandhi died the world knew that here had passed one of the richest of men, yet at his death he possessed a pair of spectacles, a pair of sandals, a few simple garments, a spinning wheel and a book!

Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “A man is rich in the proportion to the things he can let alone.”

Life, to Gandhi seemed a process of gradual divestment of needs. From a squalling infant who needs everything, to an adult who needs virtually nothing.

This is not to say that poverty should be the goal, or that an ascetic denial of material progress or possessions makes one a “mahatma,” a great soul. Many a great soul has been vastly surrounded by material possessions.

There are certain constant factors to be found in true success and true happiness, and these are independent of wealth or achievement, poverty or asceticism.

The first constant factor is Purpose. One must know that in whatever he does he is moving forward toward a goal.

Aimlessness is the worst enemy of success. As long as one has purpose and feels that his energies and creative thought are taking him somewhere, then there is satisfaction in the journey.

There is despair whenever we feel that we are “getting nowhere.”

Success (or happiness) to be true, must have an abiding sense of purpose.

Secondly, success has the intrinsic character of a “batting average.”

A successful or happy life will have its days or even years of failure. The psychiatrists tell us of “compulsive” types of individuals who cannot bear a moment of failure.

A third constant ingredient of success or happiness, is the price of it.

There is no success or happiness for free. There is a mystical aspect of life, and that is that we have a constitutional inability to enjoy what we have not earned.

The joy of success, it seems, must be counterbalanced by the effort to achieve it and this need exists in all of us. Theodore E Steinway in his work with pianos gives constant proof that out of great tension (in keyboard) may come great harmony.

A Fourth essential ingredient, without which success is not success, is satisfaction.

Success must be enjoyed. It may be won with tears, but it must be crowned with laughter, otherwise it is not success, it is not happiness.

So many have all the outward trappings of success and happiness without the essential inner trappings of it.

They don’t FEEL successful or happy. “I’ve worked and slaved and knocked myself out – for what?” has become the refrain.

Satisfaction stems largely from an attitude and is available to all in that it begins inside, a kind of central nugget deep in the strata of our soul.

A final basic element of success and happiness is spirituality.

It is hard to imagine anyone feeling successful without also feeling related somehow to the greater purposes of life and to the Author of those purposes.

Whether one is a successful banker or a successful hobo, he must have the conviction that he is in tune with God to be happy, to feel successful.