Sometimes life can be really hard and sometimes can puts you in front of difficult choices.. but that’s the way it is!
Life is punctuated by constant choices, right or wrong it doesn’t matter, it always comes a time to choose!
But the point is: how to determine if your choice (unless is “forced”) is the right one?
How to determine whether it is primarily worth making a specific choice perhaps sacrificing important “side” aspects???
This is what I asked myself in the last few days analyzing the life of a friend and analyzing in particular what you are willing to sacrifice for your professional success.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I think that personal realization is essential in life but…
“Do we need to sacrifice aspects of ourself even parts of our life in order to see something done, to launch a project, for a new job or just for the right business relationship?”
In a video of Elizabeth Gilbert presenting at the TED conference in February of 2009. She spoke about how for the last 500 years creativity and suffering have been linked - which means that developing a new idea, a new project, etc… has been linked with sacrificing an aspect of one’s self or all of one’s self - and why this has come about.
So it came easily to me thinking if leaders suffer from their success and end up sacrificing parts of themselves (their health, values, ethics, commitments, their own passions) and their lives (their relationships, their dreams) in the process .
So I want to ask you people why? Or better.. is it worth it?
Are people, leaders, high flyers realizing that they’re maybe unwittingly sacrificing along the way in their careers in order to earn worthiness for the success of their projects and businesses?
Don’t think so…
Anyways I do believe that businesses, programs, products, services and initiatives could be successful on the merit of the vision, strategies, hard work, perseverance, teamwork and dedication that went into them, just as I believe writers know their books can be inspiring and artists know their paintings can move people. But of course you want to earn the right to be worthy of your successes - and subconsciously think that sacrificing part of yourself is the way to do this.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! There is no way to earn worthiness for your creations via sacrificing aspects of yourself, no matter how seemingly small. All you get is depleted.
Do you subconsciously doubt your own worthiness of success and of the value of what you create as a leader?
If so, are you sacrificing aspects of yourself because of this?
If the answer is NO.. you should start thinking about..
If the answer is MAYBE.. the same…
If the answer is YES.. you should start change things…
Comments 1
Interesting post
It’s not as simple as you say it though, because we all have different goals and different reasons to push ourselves to doing business and sacrificing parts of who we are.
Success is a key notion for everyone, but still it doesn’t mean the same thing, and the first question to ask yourself is : is success a road to some goal, or a goal itself for me ?
For a lot of people, work, projects and subsequently success is a life goal ! We’re conditionned to work all our life, to have a good job, to earn a lot of money , to be successfull , it’s a way of life in itself so it’s not even a sacrifice, because if you didn’t work, you wouldn’t know what to do with your time.
For fewer people (like me), it’s clearly a road to another goal : freedom. As sad as it seems, we need money to live, to eat, to travel, to read, to sleep .. all those things that a dreamer mind would love to do, but can’t without money and that’s often a problem, because clearly your dreams will remain dreams if you don’t give yourself the ability to accomplish them.
So i’ll answer YES to your question, nowadays if you want any kind of personnal success you have to sacrifice yourself at some point, your youth (our most precisous possession imho) and a little bit of who you really are, the only thing is that you have to know why you do it, analyse the “for and againsts”, and if you end up sacrificing a little bit now, but for a much greater cause … trust me, you won’t even feel like you’re sacrificing anything at all ..
BTW : there’s no doubt creativity is linked to suffering, the first one is a result of the second, we suffer because we can’t have what we want, so we try and create some way that will get us where we wanna be .. because I assume, we all wanna be drinking pinyacoladas on a shiny beach
Posted 21 Dec 2010 at 2:08 pm ¶Post a Comment