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"I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's
business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female
the moment he has succeeded in courtship. I like a state of
continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."
-George Bernard Shaw
My two dogs, Mishka and Abby, have very different personalites.
Mishka is bored unless engaged in her favorite game, which as you
might imagine for a dog, is fetch. You take her bone and throw it as
far as you can, and she chases it as fast as she can. Then she
brings it back to you and asks (well, begs) you to throw it again.
She wants to play fetch continuously, and I have occasionally
speculated that if I let her, she would keep chasing that bone right
up until the point where she collapsed of physical exhaustion.
I call Mishka a "Goal Dog", because her behavior is similar to what I
see in compulsive goal-setters. They continually set goals in every
area of their lives, driving themselves forward relentlessly towards
the ever receding goal of "making it". They rarely stop to consider
what they would do if they did make it, and those that do succeed (at
least by societies standard) often find themselves bored and lonely
until they throw themselves back into the fray.
Essentially, compulsive goal-setting is like playing a game of fetch
with yourself - you throw the bones as far as you can (set the
biggest goals you can imagine) and then chase them with hyper-focused
attention and continual action. The problem comes when your
happiness and self-worth are the bones.
For most compulsive goal-setters, their sense of well-being comes
from how well they think they are doing. And since they are
constantly raising the bar on what "success" and "making it" mean,
they are never doing well enough to feel happy and worthwhile.
There is always more action to be taken and more targets to be
reached, so there is never a sense of being content right where you
are sitting now. And, I occasionally speculate, if they let
themselves they will keep chasing those goals right up until the
point where they collapse of physical exhaustion.
My other dog, Abby, is more of what I call a "River Dog". I call her
this based on the writing of Earl Nightingale (founder of
Nightingale-Conant), who described "river people" as being those "who
are happiest and most alive when they're in the river - in whatever
business or career or profession it happens to be. And success comes
to such people as inevitably as a sunrise. In fact, they are
successes the moment they find their great field of interest; the
worldly trappings of success will always come in time."
Abby loves the park, and she loves the house. She loves going for a
run with my son, but she seems equally happy and content to hang out
on the sofa with our cat. In fact, wherever Abby is, she throws
herself into the mix without ever seeming to need things to be a
certain way.
Bizarrely, the one game Abby will almost never play is fetch. You
can throw her bone as often as you like, but unless you go and get it
yourself it will never be seen again.
When it comes to us human beings, I think of these two approaches to
life as being less about personality types than behavioral choices.
In any moment, we can decide that what we have is not enough and look
around for something to fill in the gaps, or we can decide that what
we have is exactly what we want. We can turn our "bone of happiness"
into a bone of contention and throw it off into some imaginary
future, or we can enjoy gnawing on it right here, right now.
As Henry David Thoreau wrote so many years ago:
"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck
the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not
life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not
lived."
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Today's Experiment:
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Step one: Take the week off from trying to accomplish anything with
your life. Enjoy yourself, enjoy your loved ones, enjoy your work,
enjoy your life. If you can't bring yourself to take the whole week
off, take a few days off from the game of achievement. If you can't
get yourself to take a few days off, just take one. If you can't
even take one day off from the "more, better, faster" game, repeat
step one.
Have fun, learn heaps, and may you live all the days of your life!
With love,
michael
PS - In case you think I missed out on step two, I didn't. There is
no step two. When it comes to living fully in the moment, nothing
happens next!
=================================================
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(c) 2008 Michael Neill/All Rights Reserved
Genius Catalyst Inc.
4220 Esteban Road
Woodland Hills, CA
91364
US
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