Tag: failure

Are you worthy?

Posted on by philipdodson

We live in a world where our worthiness is constantly challenged and, we as individuals, are always questioning this in our heads. The society has created this challenge for all of us.

Worthiness

What is our worthiness based on? Not just by society, but how do we internally justify our worthiness?

This whole thing of feeling worthy is such a big thing and it has such a huge impact on our lives.

I am reading a book at the moment called ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor. He talks about the fact that society wrongly believes that ‘success leads to happiness’. Where all of his and others research points to the fact that is ‘happiness leads to success’

Success is measure in many different ways, but typically success is always measured by numbers or how big something is or by achievement. This then leads to deciding whether or not we are worthy, whether or not we are a success.

So how many followers you have on Twitter, friends on Facebook, how many ‘likes’ your Instagram #selfie got. Then we’ll look at the title on your business card, how many A* GCSE’s you got, how big the car is, the size of your house, the labels you wear and the list goes on. The achievements that you can rack up and what you have done.

These will be the measures that others use to judge us by and then we can add on all the internal things that we will add ourselves, driven by our fear of what others think of us.

So we’ll compare our pay with others or wealth in general and then determine just how worthy we are or not.

This is serious stuff, as it will effect our sense of self-worth, our self confidence and will ultimately lead to judging ourselves against others. This will create this false truth that others are more important, or better, or more worthy of something because of it.

We have all been guilty of thinking that a ‘successful’ wealthy business person is more important or better than us. Or someone who society has told us to judge as being more handsome/beautiful is a better and more worthy person.

Our society is so infected with this damaging way of measuring success or failure, worthiness or not. It is having a huge impact on peoples mental and physical well-being.

The fact is that it is all a load of bullshit. We are all human beings, we are all as good and worthy as anyone else. The size of your salary, wealth, car, house, tits, the labels you wear, the number of followers, or any other achievement based measure is all irrelevant.

These shallow measures are a curse on our whole society and it is time to stop supporting this system and time to stay true to your values.

The fact is there is no right or wrong in life, after all, if there was the definitive rule book or manual for life, then Amazon would be selling it by the millions of copies.

Society imposes these measures on us and we don’t have to accept them. We need to stop caring about what others think, how others judge us does not matter.

As Brene Brown says in her book ‘Daring Greatly’, we are already worthy. No amount of stuff, achievements etc will make us any more worthy than someone else.

We need to start off with sorting our own minds and we need to start telling ourselves that we are worthy and we are equal to others. Then we need to stop judging others and we need to start viewing everyone else as another worthy human being.

Then we need to stop measuring our ‘success’ by these shallow things. We need to realise that success is a personal thing, where there is no right or wrong. We can define our own measure of what success is.

After all at the end of our lives, we will not look back on the stuff we owned, or the number of followers we had, or how big our salary was. We will look back on the legacy that we are leaving, the impact that we have had on others, the people we’ve met and the moments that we’ve had with them.

It is about being happy, building the life that we want and creating something that we leave behind. We all need to make our own personal difference.

So next time you look at your payslip or the number of friends you have on Facebook, realise none of that matters, it can’t improve your happiness and you are already a worthy human being. Chase your dreams and build your own life that makes you happy.

One day away from an Albatross

Posted on by philipdodson

Today is just one day away from being an albatross and that’s not to be sniffed at! It means I will have completed 30 days of writing my 750 words each day in a row without missing a single day.

albatross

It’s funny by having the arbitrary levels, that they have set, motivates me to keep going, I mean all I get is an online badge with a graphic of an albatross on it, it’s not like I even get a picture and I am certainly not going to be given the real thing as an award. Not that I’d know what to do with a real albatross, that has a wingspan of 12 feet. Plus I guess a real albatross would eat a lot of fish and smell pretty bad.

It shows that by having something to aim for no matter how small, has a big impact on our focus. It isn’t about the badge itself, it’s actually about the status of it and that as you write more and more, without a break, and as you write quicker, you reach an elite of writers on 750 words.

This is interesting in life, that we are often driven by very odd things. People set off thinking that it is going to be all about money and the perceived status that can be bought by money. As you get more money, you can naturally upgrade your status by having bigger and better stuff than the ‘Jones’ and therefore have more bragging opportunities.

However, most people work out that the money motivation wears thin pretty quickly and that it only tends to lead to dissatisfaction when you cant keep up. You then feel like you have failed because you can’t afford the next financial upgrade to your life.

Anyway so my point about the badges in 750 words is, that they were put there by the guys who wrote the app and they decided that 30 days of continuous writing was to be awarded an albatross. It could have been 28 days and you get a goat or 35 days and you get a goldfish.

The fact is that badge is enough to keep me going, especially as I have got closer and closer to it. Also the other factor in this, once you have gone so far from the ‘shore’ you feel less like giving up, as you have put so much in already. I have invested now approximately 14 hours of writing and about 22K words.

Therefore, the trick to this is to find other areas of your life that you can apply this to. After all, I can set my own badges for my own goals that I can achieve. In fact not just a badge, but a reward as well as a badge.

The badge is the recognition, the status symbol, that to be honest we all need in life. Not a materialistic badge, as they are just shallow.

So I am going to think overnight and add to my routines some badges that I can add, like to my weight loss target, to my marketing goals, in fact to any target or goal that I have set myself in my biz or life.

The next step is to then add a reward to each stage that I reach. Rewards are a critical part of success. Now for example, each pound I take off on the way to my target weight of 15 stone by end of October, I could reward myself with chips and a doughnut – joking. But I could say that each pound I lose, I could put some money towards a massage or some new sports kit etc.

It is important to celebrate success and it is important to get recognition from peers/family/friends. The measure of what success looks like is personal to all of us and it only you that can decide.

Success is a funny thing, that we tend to often look at it in very black & white terms. It’s either 100% success or we have failed. There is often no in between, we have it hounded into us that 2nd place is a failure. Life needs to be lived in the grey zone. Therefore we need to have a different outlook on success and realise that we rarely achieve 100% total success and therefore, we need to say that partial success is OK and isn’t a failure.

Failure really does not belong anywhere, as it is an opportunity to learn and then to be forgotten about and moved on from.

So add badges to your goals and celebrate the steps to your realistic success.