On Redefining Success for yourself
Living life differently than everyone else
Over the last several years I have redefined what success means to me. Living in the “lower end” area of town, I grew up always comparing my house to others. My cousins had big houses, my friends had big houses, and I had a normal house. In hindsight, the house I grew up in was actually quite lovely, but I was comparing it to the signature homes of the area that all of my friends and cousins lived in. This created a skewed frame of reference of what success was, what money was meant for, and what conditions I needed to meet in order to be amongst the others. Without those conditions I saw my life through a disadvantageous lens that inhibited interactions of all kinds. I couldn’t have people over because I worried they’d see my house and judge it. And of course as a kid my realness was dictated by what others told me was real, so what other people thought was a real concern.
The problem was that this paradigm continued into adulthood. Out of college I worked in Hollywood while also starting an audio electronics business. As my business grew I transitioned out of Hollywood and committed to building high end audio systems full time. I taught myself electronics, designed the lowest distortion power supplies in the world, built a whole line of audio products, and made a lot of money. And then I got that big, empty house.
And I wore it like a badge of honor.
I was more successful than people my age and therefore I was valid.
And this was all well and good until the whole thing crashed and burned along with my identity of “having it figured out before everyone else.” I didn’t have it in childhood so I had to make up for it later in life.
It turns out you are forced to redefine success when you have it and lose it. You might think that you redefine success as a means of self preservation, and sometimes it is. But in this case, I tend to be brought through particular challenges that teach me realizations I’ll later need to teach to others.
Success isn’t a destination, it’s a journey through a particular quality of experience. Most people see success as a series of checkboxes that makes them worthy. Like me having that big house, I checked the boxes and that allowed me permission to exist. It gave me something to strive for because at the time it was the only metric I had to assess my success.
But what if assessing success, defining success, achieving success... what if these things aren’t what matter at all?
Most people spend their lives focusing on “effects” they want. They are interested in outcomes. But now 10 years after that business failed, and after teaching for close to 24 years, I realize that a focus on effects is part of the problem. They think having the house, having the money, having the relationship, gets them something they can’t have now. And back then that’s what I thought too. “If I have this attribute I can have this outcome.” But the reality is this is a focus on effects pretending to be causes.
Most people want the career, the house, the relationship, the adventure, not because they actually want that, but because they have been told that it’s the thing that will give them the feeling or life quality they want. At the same time they are told what feeling or life quality TO want. It’s all layers of programming and people never step back to realize none of those things are the way they actually want to live or express life.
The world I grew up in dictated that finding a good job, a big house with a white picket fence, kids, a nice car, work for 40 years and retire... all of it seems nice on the surface only because it’s what we were programmed to want. It’s what everyone is programmed to want.
But it’s also a slavery based system that encourages humans to seek endedness. It causes people to base their futures on their past, and makes them stuck in a loop determined by a system that wants it’s fulfillment not theirs. It has people yearning for the weekend, yearning for a break, yearning for retirement. It causes you to save money out of scarcity until you can maybe retire later in life only to find out most savings won’t last anyway so you need to keep working... and should have been living your life all along.
These ideas all cause people to wait until tomorrow to love their life. They can’t love their life until the weekend, they can’t love their life until they saved enough to retire. And maybe they are textbook successful, but how much time did they waste getting there? When they look back on their life once they make it there, how much of their life quality was built on what they don’t want? If you take the tapestry of your life and examine it from beginning to end, how much of that tapestry was spent on ugly colors to get merely a blip of vibrance? And once vibrance was achieved was it even experienced as vibrant?
Because when I was running my audio business I had the check boxes, but I was stressed and getting kidney stones. I was making millions in sales, but never had any money for myself. Partially because I had a lot to learn about business and pricing my products, but also just because I set my life up to follow conditions that belonged to a system and not my soul.
After a series of failures and losing everything multiple times I had to re-evaluate what I was doing and why. It wasn’t that I had to let go of having money, I had to let go of that being the cause of anything. Money is just an effect.
Lately I’ve seen so many people die so young. It made me realize that living for tomorrow isn’t living. Trying to cultivate a version of success for tomorrow, for retirement, so that I could be externally validated was not the life that was naturally flowing through me. It was pure scarcity built on a dogma that didn’t belong to me. It was someone else’s version of fulfillment, the path someone else’s consciousness took, not the one uniquely mine. I didn’t want to feel like I was constantly bailing out a sinking boat, or that I had to just put enough patches on it so that I could float until I died.
So I had to re-evaluate not just the conditions for success, but whether it was actually what I wanted. It wasn’t that I needed a new version of success so that I could feel successful “at my level.” All of that is just basic self approval. I had to realize that it wasn’t about success or goals or achievement. These metrics exist only when I am real based on someone else’s determination.
And I must be real because of my internal validity alone. I cannot live a life becoming a valence identity of someone else. Performing fulfillment that someone else determined. Following a path everyone else walks. I didn’t want to live for the weekend, for tomorrow, for retirement. Where I’m always programmed to play the waiting game for some kind of imagined rescue or relief. Where a ton of money rescues me from a life I don’t love, where retirement rescues me from stress, where the weekend rescues me from work. That is slavery, scarcity, and a recipe for a flaccid life.
It’s not that I needed to love every day, but that I wanted to LIVE every day. I don’t believe every day needs to be good. In fact, I have a deep appreciation for my challenges and the counter intentions I face. I don’t need my life to manifest perfectly every day nor do I need to be rescued from a life that has its own intelligent rhythms. But what I do believe is that survival is guaranteed, life is inherently optimistic, and that all rhythms are deeply and profoundly fulfilling.
I can either transpose the system’s version of music... akin to the AI slop that seems excellent on the surface, but which you can’t bare to listen to for more than three seconds. Everyone living the same life towards the same goals, saying the same things, having the same vision. If that vision is repeated enough times you think it’s your vision, you think it’s what you want. But it’s not your music. It’s not the true rhythm your life is leading you through if you learn to listen.
And I wanted to listen. I didn’t want to live for tomorrow. I didn’t want my purpose to be tied to success. I feel more fulfilled when I work, but that doesn’t mean my work needs to have a destination. I can create for creations sake. I can teach for the sake of teaching. I can live with purpose rather than “have a purpose.” And by living with purpose I am fulfilled not by curating a perfect life that is society-approved, but instead because I can ride the rhythms that arise out of life. I can see that there is more depth and nuance, a more vital expression out of which all things unfold.
When you believe in a universe that was accidentally formed, then your private life seems devoid of meaning and events seem chaotic. I choose to live in a subjective world in which the events of my life have reason. Even when events seem to happen in direct opposition to my wishes I see intelligence and meaning.
For me, my purpose is not just what I do. But instead the purpose is to examine the far richer and more nuanced purposes of a psychological nature that is fulfilled through every day climates of experience. Let’s say, for example, I want to walk across the room and pick up a glass of water. The purpose is clear enough that my body is automatically propelled in the proper fashion even though I am not consciously aware of the inner mechanisms involved. I do not see blocks in my path like furniture or other impediments. I make a simple straight path in the direction I want to go and the act has meaning because it’s something I wanted to do. There are other purposes that are far more nuanced.
There are yearnings toward satisfactions of a psychological nature that are difficult to categorize. We have likes, dislikes, ambitions, and desires of a highly emotional nature all framed within the context of beliefs about ourselves and our world. And each of these is programmed or trained in causing us to use our minds in the way we have been taught.
One person may desire fame and have abilities that he wants to use that will indeed lead to that outcome. At the same time he may also believe that fame leads to unhappiness or bring disastrous outcomes. Here we have a counter creation, two purposes working against each other. In the case of a person who thinks all things have meaning, he will easily overcome these counter intentions, learning about himself in the process. Evaluating preconceived notions and adjusting his path. But a person who believes in the system’s dogma, that the universe is random and chaotic, then these counter intentions seem to have little meaning. They won’t see the creations in their path as part of their fulfillment, but instead antagonistic occurrences, and feel powerless in the process. Like something is being done to him.
To me, my body moves not because of physicality alone, but because intent and purpose contained within the private psychological environment propel it. My private psychological intents mobilize my energy on a psychic level. I believe we live in a body of thought, or the body of our beliefs. And there is an interplay between this internal environment, the significances created in my life, and the propulsions of my body through life.
The organization of my feelings, beliefs, and intents directs the focal point around which my physical reality is built. This follows with remarkable spontaneity and order. The world is probed with my characteristics in mind, all of my creations and counter creations, seeking others with characteristics that will suit my own. And at each level, all consciousness is involved in a vibrant fashion to organize events that suit my purposes and intents and those of others.
To me, success isn’t about endedness, but in learning to listen to this vitality. That every day this dynamic interplay of psychology, significance, and purpose are playing themselves out to my benefit, to my growth, and to my fulfillment and all of those involved. And instead of forcing it into a vision of order that was trained into me, I learn to spend more time listening to the visionary nature of what it creates on my behalf. Not as a leaf on the wind passively watching life unfold as if by luck, but by trusting my own ideas, my purposes and intentions are leading me to a fulfilling life. One well lived. One that is both rich and intricately wise. Even if it’s not always what I expect, it is constantly meaningful and shaping me towards greater expression of what I am capable of.
By living this way I let go of a finish line. Of needing to check boxes in order to be valid. I internally validate and experience each day as its own unique unfolding. Curiously seeing what each day brings, not because I have a lot to accomplish every day, but because each day’s accomplishments are part of the bigger picture. Things get done not based on checklists, but because they are the significances that arise on that day. Counter intentions and limitations get resolved not because I hunt for problems, but because I listen for tensions in my life and release them. In this way I operate on the fundamental principles of release, I become a creature of release, an open conduit through which the spirit of life can flow. This, to me, is success. Because this is what I can control consciously. There are other parts of me that control my cells, that organize significances for me to experience, that influence how my templates call forth others of a matching quality. My job is to set the conditions so that I can receive that which I desire, so I can be open to a more fun journey than I could imagine from what I’ve already seen.
So I don’t rush away from my challenges seeking to solve them as quickly as possible. I don’t rack my brain for solutions, I trust how solutions naturally arise. I don’t seek to check boxes of success so that I can later be worthy, I see my survival and validity in existence as a birthright, as a default condition. I face unfamiliarity with a sense of adventure and curiosity, not a need for safety or restraint. And because of this I FEEL successful along the way. This feeling of success organizes the rest of my life to provide varieties of success that are more profound and more fulfilling than I ever had building my audio business or having a big house. And so I build my teaching business in the same way. It isn’t about “getting it done” so I can sit on a yacht, but about fulfilling my desire to teach as desired. Fulfilling my desire to play games. Fulfilling my desire to build aspects of my life for the experience of those qualities. And in each case my purpose is to have those conditions. And along the way I face my own counter creations, resolving and refining my map to get there. I don’t clear all counter creations first, I merely set my destination to walk across the room and grab water, when I approach a couch I walk around it. I don’t make sure there was no couch there to begin with.
Success to me comes from this beautiful interaction with life, not the establishment or rigid conditions that I’m afraid of losing.