Arriving Isn’t a Thing
In what seems to be a very American way of thinking about the world, we have in our minds that success is a destination to which we must arrive. There is usually a number attached to it, or a title…. As in, to be successful, I must make x amount of dollars or to be successful I need to own my own business, have a certain number of employees, have a fancy C-suite title and to be in charge of lots of things. What I’ve witnessed, however, is that people work hard to achieve their goals and by the numbers they are “successful,” and yet, they remain miserable. So, is being financially stable or having an ultra-powerful job really the best way to define success? I think not.
What if we take the destination out of it? What if success isn’t in the achievement of a goal, but in the setting of goals and working toward them? What if success is failing and learning, changing, and growing? What if success is just in understanding what brings us joy and peace and doing that?
I have goals. I have always been someone who sets goals and works to achieve them. However, what I’ve learned through my accident, my recovery, and all the other challenges of my life, is that achieving a goal does not always equate to being happy. I may have arrived at the success destination, but am I truly successful if I didn’t enjoy the journey or don’t care at all about the fruits of my labor?
What I am focusing on now is not arriving at a particular success destination. Instead, I am focusing on thriving. To me, thriving is success. Thriving is recognizing what I love and doing more of that. Thriving is working hard to achieve my goals, enjoying the work, and knowing there is always more to do. It doesn’t feel exhausting to know that I am not going to arrive. It doesn’t feel like an insurmountable mountain. Instead, the journey is joyful. Because I am not tied to the outcome, I can enjoy working toward something and changing it along the way. There is a lot of freedom in that. And thriving can only occur when you have freedom.
Sometimes we do not have freedom because of social constructs. Sometimes we do not have freedom because of personal constructs. Both are real and both are challenging to work through. The definitions we have in our mind about what it means to be successful can be exactly what holds us back from living a successful life. You don’t arrive to success. You live life successfully.
I know you’re probably thinking (especially if your brain was constructed in America), the journey of life has highs and lows. How do we call our lows success? Failure is not success! How could you possibly define it that way, Carrie? Well, failures are learning moments. Lows are times we can use for reprioritization and for refining. A successful life isn’t one that doesn’t include struggle. If we remove the attachment to the outcome, we become less devastated by the lows, can reprioritize and refine, and keep moving forward. Perhaps our pace has changed, but we aren’t trying to arrive, we’re just trying to enjoy traveling.
This subtle mindset shift, for me, has been a game changer. Like I’ve said before, I set goals. I work hard. And, I have been devastated when some of my goals have failed. I have been devastated physically, mentally, and situationally. I was attached to arriving - if I just work harder in my marriage, it’ll be perfect. If I just work harder at parenting, my kids will live a stress-free life. If I am a better friend, a better employee. These thoughts haven’t gotten me closer to arriving at success. These thoughts were lies and made me pretty darn miserable. I was kicking my own ass to arrive at this predefined destination. A destination that was socially constructed as ideal.
Now, I work hard, but only if I’m enjoying working hard. My podcast is a great example. I wanted to create a space where people could hear stories of trauma survivors and their caregivers to gain additional resources, and to especially feel less alone. So, I decided to create Transformational Trauma and Healing. I had absolutely NO IDEA what I was doing. The easy part was finding guests for my podcast. The hard part has been keeping up with the number of people who want to tell their stories. I also had to learn how to edit audio, to create commercials, what I needed to purchase, how podcasts are hosted on the internet, and how to get your podcast listed on major podcast directories (Apple, Spotify, Amazon, etc.). All of this has been a tremendous amount of work. Each week it is a tremendous amount of work when I record and edit. And I am loving every minute of it. If I keep loving it, I’ll keep doing it. If I find myself overwhelmed or feeling like it’s a chore, I’ll slow down. I’m not attached to the outcome. Success doesn’t mean 100+ episodes or gobs of sponsors. While both of those things would be nice, success is one person getting something out of each episode. Here’s the crazy thing, I may never know that someone got something out of it. I may never hear. I just need to believe that someone did, that it reached the ears that needed to hear it. I feel good about what I am producing, and I am trusting in the universe to get it to the people who need to hear it.
We add so much suffering to our lives by trying to live up to socially constructed ideals of success. We miss the beautiful journey of life by working so hard to arrive. Hard work isn’t a bad thing. Having goals isn’t a bad thing. Disengaging from the life you're living in order to reach a destination that is made up will only end in suffering, even if you reach the destination that you believe is success. Joy in the work of life is what matters. Where that ends up doesn’t. Arriving isn’t a thing.
