Monday, June 3, 2013

Week 22 The Art of Living: How Do YOU Measure Success


When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own books.
MADE IT!
How Do YOU Measure Success

When I look around at my own life, I can say that I am successful. If you were to ask my kids, my accountant or some family members, they may have something else to say.
Too often, we measure success based on where we want to be rather than where we have come from. Even more often, we measure it based on what someone else tells us we should be.

I can barely remember being cold and hungry, but that was my childhood. Now, I’d rather be hungry than full. When my stomach is full, I am uncomfortable, but when I am hungry I know without a doubt that I will eat again and that I will never be as hungry as I was growing up.
When one of my children first came to me, she could barely read and write. She was 8 years old and knew I had a great deal of work to do. I worked hard and she worked harder and soon was on her way. One day, a new teacher called me in to say that she was worried because my daughter was reading a year below her grade level. I laughed and told her that this was amazing because it meant that in one year; she had caught up for four.

My daughter had been successful in her work but because she was not where here teacher thought she should have been, her worked had been viewed as not quite enough.
We can’t measure our own success by someone else’s standards. If I did, I could have stopped working long ago.

Our standards and goals should be sky high and our work should match it, but these standards should be our own creation, our drive should come from within and our need to do more should never stop.
If we determine our own success, we can constantly raise the bar. We can work harder and harder without the prying prods of Wall Street, Oprah and someone else’s idea of what God told them about you.

I am not done, but I have done well.

Stop looking around at someone else’s dream and make your own.

That’s it.

BE you, be well, be your own success.
                                                                        Bertice Berry, PhD.

No comments:

Post a Comment