I bet you’d agree that many of us learned to believe that success is about money.
In fact, money is often the one determining factor we use to define success. The problem with believing success is about money is that we walk through life chasing one thing, when other things matter as much, if not more.
Happiness and meaning matter too.
It’s not until we look around and realize that our money is not enough, that we feel compelled to do something. We even notice that in order to make a lot of money, we are trading away our happiness.
Sure, the money is great, but we discover that there is a cost for our success.
We can change how success looks in our lives.
It takes a bit of soul-searching and getting to know who we really are and what is important to us.
This process can help us trust that we don’t need to remain stuck, making money at the expense of our quality of life.
I first discovered this 3 years into my career. While I was making a lot of money in my first job, I was also extremely unhappy. I was so unhappy that I knew I had to change. That forced me to look more closely at who I was and what I wanted from my life. That was when I started creating new rules for myself.
I often said, “You couldn’t pay me enough money to live this way.”
That was my first step of awareness.
So I switched jobs “to be happy,” and although I didn’t expect this outcome, I made only one fifth of my old income. Of course I wasn’t quite hoping for that extreme, but that became a valuable lesson for me.
I learned that I could survive on less.
It wasn’t easy. It was painful, but the experience was priceless. I learned that we can strike a balance between happiness and income. Life didn’t have to be all about making more and more money.
Personally experiencing that balance made life better, but even then, I was unhappy. When I decided to leave dentistry for good, I was forced again to re-evaluate what success meant to me.
As I pursued other career options, I knew I would likely not have the same income potential I had in dentistry. And I struggled to have the quick money-making success we all hope for.
After losing my “success,” this was a tough pill to swallow. In order to keep myself going, I had to continuously redefine success. If I didn’t do that, then surely, I’d be a failure. Plus, I wanted there to be more to life. There had to be. I didn’t want to remain trapped by my old definition of success.
After all, the old definition took me down the wrong path in the first place.
Over time, something changed in me. As I experienced more happiness while making less money, I started focusing more on what I had than what I didn’t have. I didn’t have to force it. This new happiness felt natural.
I started experiencing that not only could I survive on less, but I could also thrive with less.
And that was the proof I needed… mostly.
Part of me thought I had cleared out this mentality, until recently.
Recently my coach (yes, I have one too,) and I were discussing success, and the theme came up again. She asked me to evaluate whether I believed that success is about money.
And I couldn’t lie. It was still there.
And then I really analyzed the sentence: Success is about money.
In that moment, I noticed how much my perception really had changed. I actually don’t believe that success is about money. Instead, success is about being fulfilled, being purposeful, and having meaning in your life and what you do.
Money preferably comes with this success, but it is not the definition of success. How freeing is that!
How much proof do we need to stop believing money defines success?
Clearly undoing old beliefs takes a lot of time and effort. Even after holes get poked in our ideals of success, it’s easy to continue holding on to this belief. Even after seeing that successful people are not immune to tragedy, it’s still hard to let the power of money go.
Witnessing how success itself can fail successful people helps us re-frame success, but there’s an even better way.
When you experience different types of success and failure for yourself, that’s when it really starts to click.
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