To discover who you want to be, you have to find your definition of success.
If you don’t, you will spend your life searching for the dream someone else had for you: your parents, your environment, advertising, etc.
For me, success makes you feel good inside your skin and helps you move forward when you feel bad.
Let me explain to you what worked for me. Perhaps maybe it will work for you.
Process
Find out what activities make you feel good.
Make a list (I did).
Then be honest and cross off from that list the things you are bad at (I liked to rap, and I was terrible at it, so I discarded it).
Gradually keep crossing off the things you are less good at until you are down to two or three things.
In my case, they were blogging, copywriting, and literature.
Finally, look for REALISTIC ways to monetize one of those three activities.
If you don’t find the path to make it profitable, start the process again until you find something in your list that fit.
How to apply it to your life
Well, now you don’t have to be fooled by the typical search engine success sites. So having a concrete goal can establish strategies to help you prosper and make a living from your gift.
Try to get better at what you do, a little bit every day. Don’t compete against others. Compete against yourself. You are your measure.
Every time the day is over, score yourself from one to ten and ask yourself Does what I am doing make me feel good? Is what I am doing beneficial to my environment or society? Does what I am doing motivate me to keep doing it even when my days score below 5?
Suppose you get three YES for long enough; then success is a matter of time.
Success is the product of inner peace.
Takeaway
You need to find your center again and again.
That center is your inner peace, a state of well-being, different from joy or happiness. It is a place where you can be sad from time to time. It is a place where pain hurts when it has to do it. It is a place where emotions are not repressed; it is allowed to laugh and cry.
Happiness is the effect, not the cause; success is the effect, not the cause; reread it.
You have to engrave it in your mind and your heart. Because if you don’t, you will surely end up conditioned by your environment, shooting at the wrong target.
If what you pursue does not make you feel good, it will not make you happy, and therefore you will not be successful.
Remember how Robin Williams or Amy Winehouse ended up? And they were supposedly very successful people.
What we culturally call success IS NOT. And it is dangerous because it can turn into a dead end. So, search for whatever makes you feel alive but also in equilibrium.
Peace.
A virtual hug
AG