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Keys to Effective Change
Survive and
Succeed
Many of the basic keys to survival are also
necessary ingredients to success in life. For example, if you hope
to survive an accident (such as a plane crash) in a remote area, the
first thing you must do is to make up your mind: You must decide or
choose to survive. You must make that a top priority.
The same is true with any kind of success in life.
If you want to achieve some higher or better level of living, you
must choose to make that your goal.
Success is not the same thing for everyone.
Some people see a greater income as success, while others want a
simpler and more "natural" lifestyle as real success. No
matter what you want to accomplish in life, you must first decide to
go there if you ever want to get there. Real success is
becoming what you always wanted to be, and doing what you always
wanted to do. What Do You
Want to Be? What Do You Want to Do?
It's very important to know enough about yourself
to know what you really want and where you should be going.
Too many people still hold onto childish ideas of what they would
like to be in life. Sometimes we are following the ideas given
to us by our parents, or by some other loved one. Maybe they
thought we should be a doctor, a lawyer, a famous writer. But
we need to know what is down deep inside our own hearts.
God creates every living thing to fill a specific
place in life. Each living thing has a purpose, a function, a
job to do. Actually, most all living things have many
functions. And every living creature is important. We
are finally starting to learn that in biology and ecology. All
creatures, and all living organisms have their place.
The same thing is true of people. Every living
soul has a purpose in life. There are things only you can
really do. You are important to the grand scheme of things.
If you fulfill your good purpose, you will help to make the world a
little better. While many of us do manage to
accomplish our basic role in life without ever really thinking about
it, it pays to know who you are and what you should be doing.
You can avoid much unnecessary misery, for example, by not trying to
be someone you were never meant to be. Try to be true to the
essential abilities and desires God gave you at birth, and to the
activities that greatly inspire and excite you now.
What do you really enjoy doing? What moves you
and makes life more interesting? Make a list of these things.
Then pull back and see what the underlying activity/fulfillment
really is. For example, if you like the idea of tattooing,
maybe art itself is the real attraction, or design.
Many of us suffer at some point in life from a lack
of creative accomplishment. We get stuck in school and at our
jobs doing things that enable us to "succeed" at some level, and we
fail to look beyond that path. People are creative by nature.
We are problem solvers. We need to accomplish goals, build and
design, organize ideas, activities or objects. By nature we
tend to change things from how we found them. That can be good
or bad, of course. The greater happiness comes from making
things better through our work. Someone
builds tables. Someone else makes cakes, pies and a good meal.
Another person organizes a crew of workers. Still another
person builds houses, designs a new shoes, paints buildings, or
publishes a magazine. All kinds of people and all kinds of
skills, but each one has a place. You have a place.
Many destructive people are creative people who went
wrong. Somehow things got off track. Instead of being
encouraged to become what they were, maybe others tried to force
them into a pattern that simply never worked. History shows
that even the worst criminals can often be turned around.
People need a chance to do good things, and to find the gifts buried
sometimes deep inside.
Give Yourself a Chance
Most of us simply need to take the time to find the
abilities and motivations that have always been there. Then we
need to allow ourselves the opportunity to develop those skills and
to learn more about the activities that "move us" the most.
Whatever success is to you, you will get much
closer by first knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.
Know yourself. Develop the basic abilities you have.
Study and practice the skills you need to get to the place you want
to be. Most of us can learn anything we need to learn — at any
age. But we still need to make the choices, take the steps,
and put our dreams into motion. Jim |
