A Metaphor For Success
Hi everyone! I hope you are doing well! It feels like after Memorial Day Weekend everything slowed down a little bit. I had some time to work on some of my personal projects. I want to be successful in what I am doing. But what does it mean - to be successful? Do you know what success means to you?
Here is the link to the video for today's article - A Metaphor For Success.
I started taking online course from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. The name of the course is "Success". Pretty straightforward. I haven't finished it yet, one more week left. But I already love this course! It is amazing! I highly recommend you to take it. You can pay for it, or you can audit it for free. I am not paying, and I am very thankful that I can get such type of valuable information for free. Professor has so much wisdom and he uses a lot of simple examples which help to understand the ideas. This course helped me to understand what success means for me, and today I hope I will be able to help you to see what does it mean for you!
One of my favorite exercises in this course was metaphor of success. I needed to come up with some allegory for the way I see success. You know that we hear a lot about a ladder for example, how you can climb higher and higher. This is a metaphor for success, but not very good one. First of all, it usually looks like you are there on this ladder by yourself. And you also don't really see where is the end of it, and how the end will look like. So you are climbing and climbing somewhere alone. It seems pretty meaningless to me.
Competition as well is a very common metaphor for success. And I do understand that winning in competition is very pleasant, but it is very fleeting type of happiness. And success should bring more long-term joy from my point of view.
As an example of deeper metaphor, professor brought up a stone that was thrown into the water. And this stone created a lot of little waves, ripples, that affected the surface much bigger than the size of the stone itself. And this influence we can consider as success. When you are doing something and your actions bring joy not only to you, but they make life of other people better.
So I decided that I needed to come up with my idea of success. Metaphor helps to remember about your values, so it can be a great reminder of where you should be heading. And all of a sudden I got it! I got a perfect metaphor of what success means to me! And since I got it, it helps me everyday!
So here is my cute idea :-)
To me to be successful means to be like the sun! You don't need anything from anybody. You have enormous capacity of helping all around you. And even if people do not see you, like we can't see the sun at night, you actually are still shining! Your kindness, your compassion, your desire to share the warmth doesn't depend on anything, its just always there. What a wonderful life it can be, when you are like the sun! This is what I want for myself. This is my ultimate goal.
This metaphor helps me everyday to be better. And it brings smile to my face when I think about it. I am a little sun, I want to shine and bring a lot of light to others! And I will try my best to be successful!
I also want to share another metaphor. It is not so much about success, but about direction that we can take in order to be happier. I believe that we all should do whatever feels right. I talked about it in one of my previous articles - My Favorite Rule. And a good metaphor for staying on the right path can be our planet Earth :-) If you look at other planets in Solar System, they are not that lively. But Earth is so perfect. It has everything we need, because it is exactly at the right place. If it was closer to the Sun, it would be too hot, if it was further away, it would be too cold. But because our beautiful planet is on the right spot, we can enjoy its beauty! So you can be exactly at the right spot too. And I believe that when we are doing what we love, this is when we start to flourish, when we blossom, when we have the right energy. When we feel burned out or demotivated, it means that we just need to get back to our perfect spot. You can feel it, we all know what is the right thing to do.
I would like to share very beautiful speech by Steve Jobs, where he talks about his path and how important it is to live your own life, not the life of others - Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.
Please think about your metaphor, what does success mean to you? Can you come up with idea that will give you energy everyday? What can help you to live your life, to achieve your goals?
I hope you liked my metaphors. And I wish you find yourself and will shine bright and sharing your light with others!
Please take care of yourself!
Be Strong And Love Yourself!
From Dasha With Love!
Love Wins!
PS: I also wanted to share a dress that I just sewn for summer! This was a very easy pattern. I only added two darts in the bust area, everything else worked perfectly. I used linen for this project, so my body can breath during hot summer days. Here are the links to the pattern and fabric:
I also wanted to share photos I took in Chicago Botanic Garden. If you live in Chicago area, I recommend you to visit this place, it's beautiful and wasn't crowded even in sunny day!
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