“Let us have that great pride in our individuality that would scorn to let petty pique or vanity keep us from doing what we know is right. Wear the robes of your royal pride in such kingly fashion that it would seem no sacrifice to stoop to brush off that which might stain them.
Let us make this life of ours a joy to ourselves and a tower of strength to others. Then shall we have made this life a success, no matter what its results. We shall have made character—and character is real life. The truest success is not the one the world often holds highest—that which is rung up on a cash-register. The truest success is a strong nature, living at a high but steady moral pressure, and radiating love, kindness, sympathy, strength, tenderness and joy to others.” ~ William George Jordan
I imagine that it would be easy to dismiss this advice given some 100 years ago by a relatively unknown American editor and essayist as being wishful thinking or impractical idealism. It is easy to miss the important things in life when you’re caught up in the rat race, but I trust that if you are reading this you are not a rat.
You, dear reader, are endowed with self-awareness, intelligence and creativity. You may have your ups and downs, but at the end of the day (and every part of it for that matter) your sentience and capacity for reason can and should be used to reposition your crown of individuality and prepare you for the challenges that are sure to come in your tomorrows.
Take a few moments to write down how you define success in life for yourself. It’s not as easy as you might think, but the exercise is well worth the effort. Once you’ve defined it, you then have something against which you can square your every thought, word and deed.
Gregory Hake 
This gift of life, deserves only repayment in a life well lived.
When one can truly look back at the errs of days past and honestly say… I learned, and gave it my all.
For each the point must, and does as we hold steady, come that a clear choice be made, a line in the sand drawn, and it be finished, and begun.
That day is here, now, tomorrow, and forevermore.
Thanks Gregg!
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It can be worthwhile and revealing to put things on paper sometimes, especially in this case if one can see layers of conviction and motivation that don’t necessarily square up to each other. In other words, we may have more or less obvious, established ideas about what would constitute success, and yet those ideas may not line up with certain subconscious compulsions and motivations that have their own ideas about success!
If lofty ideas could have saved the world, I’m sure the world would have been saved by now. It is the honesty and strength to face incongruencies in ome’s own motivation and action and to square them to what one knows to be true that makes the difference. These posts focus this opportunity each day, and that is a gift.
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Success is when I actualize and make manifest the highest awareness I currently hold of my inner nature. As my awareness grows, then so does the marker of my success; thus I am able to hold myself to an increasingly higher standard as the days and nights move on. I solely am responsible for my success, and grateful I am when assistance is offered, to the point where I can only pay that back by offering assistance to others in times of need.
I continually rededicate my efforts on a daily basis, knowing full well that complacency and self-satisfaction are the enemies of progress. If the promise of overcoming the world’s darkest ills is to be fulfilled, my contribution to that can leave no room for interpretation. The crown of my individuality needs to bet set straight and kept polished for this to occur.
This is my vow and may I be judged by my works.
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I enjoyed reading your definition, Ricardo. Thanks for sharing!
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I appreciate the esteem you have for your readers and I quite agree. Speaking for myself, I am not interested in reaching my advanced years wondering if I missed the primary reason for MY existence. Wanting ones life to be a success means understanding what that is. One of the gifts this series has been to me is not settling for “light weight” thoughts about my individuality. Glib answers of, “to be happy” or “serve others”, that echo through the emptiness of unused space as the perverbial sound bite, is not commensurate to the design and power of our personage. Just examining our capacity for reason and the influence it wields demands we clearly understand how to measure our use of them. The answer to the question is not only an exercise for distilling our thoughts but we actually can bring into clear focus what our target is. Thank you.
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I believe that our sentience and our capacity for individuality gives us a responsibility to use that capacity in the right way. People get into semantics about what that means, but it’s usually disingenuous. While I do believe that people can lose their way and get stuck in the mire of struggling in what seems important in society, something like today’s post should be able to shock them up out of it. Take the opportunity. If you write down what success means to you, use that as a template for your future. We all know what is means to be a “tower of strength to others”, and the way to become that has been put in front of you.
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Mine is simple: leave every place, situation, conversation better than I found it.
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Now that is a succinct, but all-encompassing definition. Thanks for sharing!
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Thank you (!!!) for sharing these practical steps on how to increase the worth of our living.
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“Character is real life” … Great way to put it!
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