“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
Monetary success can be a powerful motivator, and it can control people. It chooses careers. It dictates how time, energy and resources that we spend daily. Not only that, but it also influences relationships, schedules, and families. To many, it becomes an all-consuming passion leaving people broken at the end. Broken, because they let it define them. Rather than defining life itself.
Unfortunately, it’s not the greatest calling we have in life. Because, comparing it to your significance, it fades quickly.
With financial success, you are limited in multiple ways. You are at the mercy of a national economy, the world economy, and your personal economy that you live to support.
Financial success also has an expiration date, the same day you take your last breath. The moment you leave this planet, all wealth and possessions will be immediately given to someone else. You may get to pick where your possessions go, but they’ll never be yours again. Significance, however, lasts forever.
Ego drives your motives. It’s never enough. With financial success, people are never satisfied. No matter the amount of success attained, ego gets in the way of things, and it constantly wants to be fed more.
But, with significance, it becomes a different story. With significance, no matter whether your presence is still on earth, your significance will always outlast you. You will always have it, and nothing can ever take that away from you.
Your significance will always carry on; it keeps giving. When you change the life of another human being, and he or she impacts another life, from which someone else will influence another; it never stops.
And, it satisfies you. It drives your inner happiness. Unlike the thirst for financial success, significance will satisfy you down to your deepest heart and soul. It will let you practice each emotion inside of you. In the morning, you wake up with a purpose, and at night you can rest your head on your pillow being confident knowing you’ve lived a fulfilling day.
Unfortunately, too many people spend their life chasing only success. And, while some may achieve it more than others, 99% of them will still end up living an unfulfilled life. Wealth does buy comfort. But, it can destroy relationships, create vultures around you, and make your world even smaller. As you shift your focus to significance, you will wonder why you wasted time. I’m not saying go be a monk, you can actually accomplish both, just keeping your moral compass always intact.
So take a moment to see, what you’re really after. Are you after numbers in a bank account, something vain that will eventually fade, or are you after a fulfilling significant life? If we only have one life, and we truly never know when the last moment may be, let’s make the most of it. Don’t become that person that one day who realized that they lived an unfulfilling life.
Significance. Purpose. Legacy. Whatever you want to call it. The earlier you realize, why you were put on this planet, the importance of this calling, the easier you can take every moment knowing life is about giving to this world more than is given to you.
Find that clue, grow those relationships, live for them, and you’ll realize that happiness can never be bought only shared.