What if success was not about personal achievement, but how much you can uplift those around you? Join us as we debunk the myth of success being a solitary journey, instead, we unravel the profound concept of selfless success. We traverse the path of the selfless journey of our unsung heroes - doctors and police officers, and how their success contributes to societal prosperity. Listen in as we illuminate the significance of sharing knowledge, emphasizing that those who are generous with their success are the ones who truly flourish.
The narrative takes a turn as we take a stand against the toxicity that can tag along with success, especially when it's pursued selfishly, sacrificing health, relationships, and ethical standards. We elucidate the power of leading by example, demonstrating how a generous leader can positively impact their community and business. We'll also remind you that success should be a personal definition, unhindered by societal expectations. So, grab a seat as we unravel how true success is intertwined with selflessness and growth. You might just realize that you've been successful all along!
What if success was not about personal achievement, but how much you can uplift those around you? Join us as we debunk the myth of success being a solitary journey, instead, we unravel the profound concept of selfless success. We traverse the path of the selfless journey of our unsung heroes - doctors and police officers, and how their success contributes to societal prosperity. Listen in as we illuminate the significance of sharing knowledge, emphasizing that those who are generous with their success are the ones who truly flourish.
The narrative takes a turn as we take a stand against the toxicity that can tag along with success, especially when it's pursued selfishly, sacrificing health, relationships, and ethical standards. We elucidate the power of leading by example, demonstrating how a generous leader can positively impact their community and business. We'll also remind you that success should be a personal definition, unhindered by societal expectations. So, grab a seat as we unravel how true success is intertwined with selflessness and growth. You might just realize that you've been successful all along!
Success is selfless, and, when you think about it, your success isn't for you. Your success is for everyone else, and that's a hard concept to wrap your head around. I mean, if you're a doctor, you start out and you went to medical school and then you worked and then you did your residency, and this entire time you're not being paid for your endeavors, and people are benefiting from the good that you are doing, but it's not you that's inherently benefiting. You benefit, after all of those things when you get paid. If you're a police officer, maybe that's what you wanted to do, right, and you're doing it for you. Maybe it's for selfless reasons at first, right, but when you're serving and you're protecting, your job and your duty is still for the benefit of everyone else and you just happen to get something out of it. I think, at its core, though, we have to really analyze what success is to us, because success has to be selfless in order for you to become more successful than you are at this current juncture.
Speaker 1:
I think that there are people who, when they experience success, they try to keep it to themselves, and those people are not successful, they're just experiencing success. You have some people that they just try to keep everything a secret. They'll never. They'll see that you're struggling and they'll know why you're struggling. They'll understand why you're struggling and they won't even lend you a word of advice. They won't tell you why it is that you're struggling. You're trying to start a new business endeavor, but they try to keep a monopoly on knowledge, not realizing that in the long run they're really holding themselves back.
Speaker 1:
I think that the people who are the most giving, and when they're learning they share the knowledge with others. When they're growing, they share. Notice, I'm not saying giving, not giving something away, but sharing. Sharing and giving are not necessarily the same thing. I can share you knowledge by me sharing my knowledge with you. I'm teaching you how to fish, meaning that now you can fish for yourself and now we can build each other up.
Speaker 1:
You can't make something from nothing. You can only make something from something. It takes money to make more money and, mind you, if everyone in your circle is successful everyone's eating, eating, good, as the kids say then you guys can all build each other up. But it would be very hard if everyone tries to build each other up when no one has anything and too many people think that they can only be success successful so long as everyone else is less successful than they are. And those people maybe they have the shiny things at the start, but in the long run they're the ones that are empty. They're the people that may have a little bit of money, but they can never be happy, they can never be content. It's never enough for them. Enough is never enough, because the more you get in life sometimes, the bigger the void in your heart becomes.
Speaker 1:
And there are other times that you give, and when you're giving it's almost as if you're really giving to yourself. When you're giving to others, it's like giving to yourself. It's like you're giving yourself a gift, because that's a feeling to know that you're doing good, to know that you're being generous or charitable. It's good for your brain, is good for your conscience. It means you get to sleep good at night, knowing that you're a selfish person, knowing that you're conniving, knowing that you never help those that you can help. I'm not saying handouts, I'm saying helping those that you can help. How do you get to sleep good at night, or sleep well? I don't think that a sound sleep gets to be your friend. However, the person that gives freely and truly, gives out of the goodness of their heart. Those are the people who are really successful.
Speaker 1:
Sacrifice is essential to to being successful and there are a lot of times where, when you're on your journey, you realize that the success comes first and then the money comes after and you'll have the sleepless nights and the missed birthdays and the missed dinners. I mean, I remember when I was in college and I was working two jobs and I was interning and not having a social life. It sucked, it did, but now I can say that it was worth it. You know, I knew that that was only a season, it wasn't going to be forever, but it was worth it. And the lessons I got out of that experience I get to share them with you now, in that if you're a true entrepreneur, that means that you only get to have delayed gratification. If you're a truly great entrepreneur, a truly successful entrepreneur, it means that you get to eat last. You work the longest hours at first. When you're starting out, you miss the football game, soccer games, the dance recitals, the swim meets. You miss those things at first. Everyone that works for you they get a paycheck every week. Maybe for you you don't get to enjoy a paycheck for five years until things really really take off. So your success, as I was saying earlier, is for everyone else. Because you're starting out, you don't get to go on the vacations, you don't get to go to the south of France, you don't get to go to Milan, but the people who work for you, they get to do those things.
Speaker 1:
At first, you learn that delayed gratification is your best friend. It makes you a better person, a stronger person, and there's nothing wrong with foregoing an immediate reward for everlasting success. There's a saying that you lead by example. If you're a hard worker but also working with intention and purpose, that means you can hold everyone else to that standard. You'll garner far more respect. You'll garner the adoration of your team and people who work for you or work underneath you to want to strive to be like you, because you are their example for what is right and what is just.
Speaker 1:
And when you take the selfless approach, your success. It creates sustainability and growth in your business, and that's very different from the person that is extremely selfish because they're so short-sighted and they take a self-centered approach and that leads to stagnation, so they never grow. Being a generous leader, you know that when you're giving, you're really giving in the form of investing. You're investing in your people and that reward maybe you get that reward 10 years. Maybe how you're rewarded is not how you expect to be. Maybe it's not a financial thing. Maybe you just teach a person to be a good human being. Who knows? Your success could positively affect your community as a whole. Maybe you're a pillar in your community because you've learned that, yes, you get financially compensated for what you do, but if you're building your community up or you're building up your people, then watch to stop you from continuously growing and advancing into new ventures in life, because your success is now spilled over into a broader body of water, if that makes sense in that you could be the small fish in a big pond, or you could be the small fish in an ocean that learned to grow into a big fish in a big ocean.
Speaker 1:
I think that that positive success is that the selflessness aspect that is One of the pitfalls of being a selfish successful person is that enough is never enough. There's never a time where they'll ever feel fulfilled, because something is always missing. They're the ones that get burned out. They're the ones that eventually get the strained relationships and they're the ones that have the limited growth potential. There's so many people that they just all they ever cared about was just I do this now, I have to do this now, I have to do this now by any means necessary. And a lot of those people that I knew that were like that. They're not working in those fields anymore, those careers, they're divorced and unhappy and starting life over in a way that is not in the least bit give them a sense of purpose in life.
Speaker 1:
And I just want to say that there is a concept of toxic success, and to me, toxic success is when someone has to achieve something at the expense of one's well-being, relationships, or they just neglect certain ethical standard, the concept of relentless pursuit at any cost, and they chase things and they don't realize the toll that it takes on their health, their work-life balance and how they have stress related health issues and they're just completely. They're strained personal connections. It's like it's non-existence and they just think. All they think about is just winning. It's not just about winning, it's always about how you win.
Speaker 1:
Having a competitive mindset isn't a negative thing I'm extremely competitive but it's the competitiveness where you just want to cause chaos for the sake of chaos, and those people are the ones that their competitive mindset is where success is measured by surpassing or outperforming others, and that's always at the expense of themselves. Because you should want to be better for you, you should want to be more efficient, more productive for yourself as a part of your own growth and development. That's not you should compete with yourself in that way. Yesterday, for example, if you did say, yesterday I only completed five tasks, today I'm going to complete six, it's not I'm going to compete 10 more tasks than that person. It's like what does that really do for you? It does nothing. It's creating a competition that is not bringing you any closer to accomplishing whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1:
And the other the part of it, too, is that the people who are selfish with their success. They constantly need the validation through external achievements, where their success is seen as their primary source of self-worth and validation. And that individual may tie their entire sense of self-esteem to their accomplishments and this makes them constantly want recognition and validation from everyone else. And then, if you want recognition and validation, just be you, as opposed to people just seeing you for the things you have, the material things that you have. They aren't you. They're not the quality of who you are. A person that makes a million dollars a year, that's a piece of crap. And a person that makes a million dollars a year and is a good person, who do you think people are going to gravitate to? Making million dollars, but different people. The other component to that is well, what personal values are these people neglecting, and do they have integrity? Or do they compromise their own values and their integrity and ethical standards? Because if they do, this is going to lead them to having constant inner conflicts and a sense of hollowness, despite their external achievements.
Speaker 1:
And for a brief portion of my life I went through that. I remember trying to just crushing and dominating everything, and that's when I had coffee for the first time too. I just was like I never needed coffee before and I started drinking coffee in caffeine heavily, and the more I would just try to just be more productive and just dominate everything. My health was just declining constantly consuming caffeine, and it got to the point where there was no amount of caffeine that would just make me be more productive. It just did not exist. And there's a bunch of so many papers I could type in one day. I can only do, but so much with the time that I have.
Speaker 1:
I had to learn that at a painful, painful, painful experience, because I got sick and I didn't know why I was sick. You know, I learned that if you don't get enough sleep, you lower your immune system. If you don't get enough sleep, then you become fatigued, you become irritable and sometimes you're just a jerk, because you're tired all the time and doesn't matter how much you've accomplished, because you're not even. You don't even have the energy to celebrate your successes. You don't even know what your successes are, because you're just focused, you have blandage on. You're just focused on trying to get more, to do more, and that doesn't get you very far.
Speaker 1:
The hardest, some of the hardest people that you'll ever meet in life they're poor, they work themselves and they never experience any form of success. They work themselves to having heart conditions, stress-related illnesses, because they're just working hard. They're just working hard and working hard and it never takes them from where they are, and just like that doesn't take them from where they are. It's the same with everyone else. You can be middle class and you just believe in working hard and just working hard and getting more money and doing and again, you're still just stuck. Because hard work can put you into a position to be successful, but it won't necessarily make you successful, because you can't be successful by yourself. You have to form connections. Hard work doesn't mean that you get to be the next Michael Jordan because you're 5'3". I don't think you're going to play a ball like LeBron James, sorry, no matter how hard you work. So hard work doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to pay off in the end, and that's a part of the lesson.
Speaker 1:
Is that the things that we're working hard at? Maybe that's not the things we should be focusing on, and maybe that's why we're not successful. We're working hard on everything else, except for the thing that's most important, which is us. The goal is, if I try to be the best person of myself and I try to work hard on myself, I will, in turn, be the boss, manager, partner, the friend. Because I'm constantly working on myself, I can be successful, extremely successful, because I'm the thing that I'm working hard at. If everything else is what I'm working hard at, I'll never be successful, and neither will you.
Speaker 1:
Just because you're working hard, it doesn't mean that you're being effective. It doesn't mean that you're being efficient. So how will you ever be successful? You don't know where you're going. You don't know where your hard work leads. It won't lead you anywhere. There has to be some form of planning involved. There has to be preparation, learning how to prioritize, and maybe someone has to teach you these things. But if you're killing yourself day in and day out and wondering why you're not making any headway, it's because you're focusing on the wrong thing.
Speaker 1:
Success is selfless. Surround yourself with the people who want to invest in you, first and foremost, and secondly, aim to work on yourself harder than you work on any job and harder than you work on anything else. If you make working on yourself your hardest just your top priority, there is nothing that you can't do except beat Michael Jordan at basketball. And again I'll repeat that one If you work on being the best version of you, you will be the best at everything else except beat Michael Jordan at basketball. There's an expression eagles fly alone because it's lonely at the top.
Speaker 1:
The process and the journey that leads you to your destination sometimes forces you to confront many of life's ugly truths. Your mind and your heart may say, yes, I can. Yet the people that love you the most are the ones that sometimes say no, you can't, and they plant seeds of doubt. In those moments, you sometimes learn that some people don't push you forward, they hold you back and they hold you down. Your goals aren't meant to be shared with everyone, and that's painful.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes you have to keep all that you want to be and all that you wish to accomplish to yourself. Water those seeds in your mind and in your heart, because sometimes the words of others they're the ones that poison the soil In which you sowed your seeds. If you keep them to yourself, you can remain positive. You can remain hungry, vigilant, until your dreams Eventually materialize into something, whatever that thing is, that's special to you. Regardless, though, remember it's not what I say success is, it's what you define success for yourself that really matters. At the end of the day, regardless if anything that I say May even sound remotely good, define success for yourself and live life on your own terms. You have one life to live. Be the best at it. The only person you have to compete against is yourself. If you enjoyed today's content, please like and subscribe for more.