Be careful of chasing after success

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Happy Sunday and thank you for being here with me for this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

If you were here last week, you’d know that today is just over a week since I quit my corporate job in finance and took the plunge into unemployment (though I prefer to say self-employment) to pursue something more aligned with my passions.

I’ve already begun to build new habits focused on my own personal growth and development, and I’ve been so incredibly happy. I look back at the year that I spent in corporate America with gratitude for what I learnt, but I’m in a place of healing now, and I have no regrets on my decision to leave.

In the past week alone I’ve really begun to discover what happiness feels like for myself and I’ve had the mental space to begin to think about new business ideas and opportunities and what life in the next few months will look like. Everyday this week, I woke up at 7am, walked a mile, practiced yoga or did home workouts. I joined a new run club, posted 2 vlogs on my Youtube channel, have been reading a lot more and have been playing a lot more music too.

As time progresses, I know I’m now on a path to start a business in something that I feel passionate about, but one week into self-employment, I’m still on my journey of distancing myself from corporate and healing from the pain and anxiety that that job caused me in the past year.

What I’ve been reading lately

I went to a book store with my best friend last week, and a book called “The Way Forward” randomly caught my attention and I picked it up and started reading it. It’s not a story book, but rather a collection of thoughts (akin to poetry but not sure if I’d call the book a poetry book).

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen me post a few pages from this book on my story in the past week.

Here’s one that resonated with me:

Be careful of chasing after success

In the past, I’ve written about defining success for yourself, and how without that clear personal definition, you will always end up chasing someone else’s definition of success for you.

This excerpt from The Way Forward resonated with me, because it focuses on the fact that success is subjective and that the goal post for success is always shifting.

Last year, when I was in a transitionary period of life between graduating college and starting my full-time job, I started to think a lot about how it easy it is to get caught up in what’s coming next, that you forget to appreciate and be grateful for what’s happening now, and more so for what’s happened in the past.

If you constantly chase after “success” in whatever form it may take, you can may find yourself being unsatisfied with life because “success” is an abstract idea that constantly changes form.

As I enter into this new chapter of life, this is really helpful for me to keep in mind, because while the world is now my oyster and I can set out to achieve whatever I want, if I’m not careful in understanding what it is that I want and what truly matters to me, I’ll be setting out on a never-ending journey with a destination that keeps moving further away.

That quote helps me to reposition my perspective on being grateful for where I am now to be at peace, so that I don’t become obsessed with where I’m going and unhappy with an inability to reach my destination.

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Just as we have to define success for ourselves, we have to define happiness too

It’s funny because, after resigning from my job, lots of people asked me what I’m going to do next. My response?

“I’m going to do what makes me happy.”

Them: “Okay, so what makes you happy?”

And that response is exactly why you need to define happiness for yourself.

If you’re like me, and you’re willing to give up something that makes you unhappy, it helps to know what makes you happy so that you can begin to give it more energy. Thankfully for me, I know that helping others, speaking, writing, playing music and running all make me happy, so I’ve been giving a lot of my energy to those things recently.

In The Way Forward, the page above resonated with me, because it again refocuses on being grounded by gratitude for the present moment, rather than wrapping up your idea of happiness in the future.

How have you defined happiness for yourself?

Have you thought about what you would say if somebody asked you “what makes you happy?”

Conclusion

In the one week that I’ve been away from my corporate job, I’ve had a lot of time to think, reflect, heal and plan. I’ve really been so much happier and feel so much lighter without the weight of that job on me.

Today, the main message I want to convey is that you have to be intentional about things in your life, and many times that means doing the work to think about how you define various abstract concepts for yourself like “success” and “happiness'“.

We oftentimes take for granted that we know what those things mean to us because society has ascribed general definitions to them in various contexts, but for me, as I enter a new chapter of self-exploration, I’ve found that it can be a challenge to pursue “success” or “happiness” if I don’t know exactly what it mean for myself.

There are endless definitions, each specific to every individual, and understanding your own requires doing the work of introspection to get to know yourself, your goals and your ambitions clearly so that you can go after them.

As you go into this week, I encourage you to take some quiet time to think about how you define both “success” and “happiness”, to reflect on how you live your life and whether it’s in line with your definitions, and if not, begin to feel empowered to make the necessary changes in your life to align with those personal definitions.

Remember you only have one real shot at this life thing, so let’s get out there and make it great!

Until next Sunday,
Justin