What got you here wont get you there...

Do your friends look at you and see a success story?

Do you know for a fact… that if you had been told at 18, that at this stage in your life you would have what you have now, you would have been over the moon?

And yet you feel like something is missing?

Like you’ve got an itch that you just can’t scratch…

Is it possible that you have you become addicted to success?

Arthur C. Brooks in his new book “From Strength to Strength” explores this idea. He talks about when we self-objectify as “successful” that this does not consider our full humanity.

We get to love the image of ourselves as successful and not the reality of ourselves which is so much more than our “success”.

Ultimately, we become addicted to our success.

And we all know where addiction can lead…. we can never get enough.

We see ourselves in a particular way and become driven by the fear of losing this social status. In fact, success becomes less about doing something good than about NOT doing something bad. Fear animates success addicts.

We need to run faster and faster on the “hedonic treadmill” to achieve constant success just so that we don’t feel like a failure.

In 1851 a philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that “Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame”. And this was more than a century and a half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.

Does any of this ring true?

These equations sum up why we can’t seem to get any lasting satisfaction

- Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want

- Success = Continually having more than others

- Failure = Having less

This sounds exhausting, unfulfilling, stressful and downright dangerous. That treadmill is getting faster and we’re all getting older!

But have no fear there is another way to find deep satisfaction just not with the old formulas!

Check out the book above or reach out to me to have a chat about what can be done so that you get to live an exciting, rewarding , fulfilling and successful life.

Who wouldn’t want that?