“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.” – Barack Obama

In today’s world, the word success has almost become synonymous with money. That is a very shortsighted view of success if not downright false. There is nothing wrong with money. It might be an element essential to success but it is certainly not the whole story.

To make a long story short, it could be said that true success is self-actualization. Success is the utmost exploitation of a person’s talent in the quest to become all that the person could be. In all of its forms, life means growth and, it’s only in fulfilling life’s main purpose that fulfillment can be found.

Being truly alive means growth or progressing from simpler to more complex forms; it’s acquiring and developing new tools that will provide more options. It’s about become more versatile with a greater range of adaptation. The essence of the purpose of life is self-actualization.

There are various ways by which self-actualization can be sought but there is one that stands head-and-shoulders about all the others and, that is through the pursuit of lofty goals or grand objectives. The pursuit of quests that are beyond one’s present reach.

By reaching for something that is beyond our present capacities, we are forced to expand and grow. We have to acquire new skills, learn new material and push our imagination where it’s never been before.

It will demand more concentration, willpower, focus and ingenuity than we ever had to date. It will require more courage than we have ever shown and it will force us into the land of the unknown where new discoveries will open entire new worlds for us. In essence, it will require an entire transformation and enhancement of our previous state.

Goal seeking is a journey of discovery and the actualization of our deepest and truest potentials. It’s modern man’s search for the Holy Grail. It’s about mountain climbing and Dragon slaying in search of who we truly are and what we possibly can become.

True success is about being and not about owning, it’s a state of mind and not a bank statement. It’s about filling our present place in life, overfilling that place and acceding to a higher plateau. It’s about continual growth on the physical, spiritual and emotional levels. It’s about experiencing, learning and achieving. It’s about becoming a Man for All Seasons.

When all is said and done, what we really want is to feel good. Unfortunately we sometimes seek that feeling in the wrong places. Feeling good is not about owning big and expensive toys. It’s about getting to be the type of person that we had to become in order to get those doodads.

Feeling good is not about security, financial or otherwise; it’s about knowing that every day we are improving and getting better and better at meeting life’s contingencies. Feeling good is not about power, control or influence. It about growing to the point where those options become available.

We were placed on Planet Earth with the specific mission metamorphosing into the best possible person that we could be. So long as our best efforts are geared toward that objective, we’re on the right path to fulfillment, internal peace and the best possible life that we can have.

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Tags: Personal Development