Beyond Weekend

"Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
- Albert Schweitzer

I came across this quote few days back and it made me ponder.

Does success give us happiness? I still believe, yes, though with a caveat that it could be for a span of time. After certain time a success no longer may make us feel elated and the benchmark of defining our success changes. And rightly so, as this is the key to progress, the urge to do more, to research, innovate and create.

The chances of success in a pursuit is definitely very much higher if you love what you do and are passionate about it. The best part of being passionate about doing something is the enjoyment you would any way get just 'doing' it irrespective of the end result. The end result will also be a reflection of your passion. Like as I believe, the best recipes are always prepared by the most willing cooks or the best analysts are the ones who delve deep passionately into their subjects.

Tracy Moris writes "The key is to not confuse happiness with success. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. In other words, instead of waiting for your circumstances to make you happy, you have to decide to be happy no matter what your circumstances."

There is no eternal success and there is no eternal happiness, so the journey is the key and to decide to be happy irrespective of your circumstances is the first step to sustain happiness.

There is another perspective to success and hapiness. Everyone would have different benchmarks of success and happiness. So it is never appropriate to comapre ones success with another's. We may percieve a person to be more successful than another, however you never know, the 'less successful' person may be the happier one.

The key is to introspect and honestly answer:

"What makes me happy?"
"What am I passionate about?"
"What do I want to do?"

With this I will leave you with another thought: Can we dare to measure our success by the happiness we have?


photo credit: Bindaas Madhavi via Flickr

What Matters Now is an ebook which you must read. It talks about the Things to THINK about and most importantly TAKE ACTION.

72 great thought leaders have contributed to this book by sharing what they are thinking about.

This is a brilliant compilation of articles being shared by Seth Godin and available for free.

You can download it here: What Matters Now

One single word, one single page each is all that took the great thinkers to share their thoughts -enough to provoke you, to make you ponder and to "shake things up".

A sneek peak into few of the articles:

Seth Godin on Generosity: If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.

Jacqueline Novogratz on Dignity: Creating ways for people to solve their own problems isn’t just an opportunity in 2010. It is an obligation.

Howard Mann on Connected: We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Rajesh Setty on Enrichment: You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you.

Mark Hurst on Speaking: Be honest, be authentic, and speak from your passion. Yes, it means taking a risk. But the results might surprise you.

Many great thoughts from the following authors:


Read it. Share it. Take ACTION.

At work you are expected to successfully deliver every task, every project, on time every time. If you fail once, you may possibly not get the chance again. Every piece of work you deliver carries with it the 'attributes' - was it precisely what was required, was it delivered on time; have YOU added value with YOUR contribution? Take a moment to think - your deliverables show your qualities. If you were the stakeholder would you say "Wow!" by the stuff you delivered?

To continuously live up and exceed the expectation of your customers and stakeholders, continuous learning is key. Learning the skills and gaining the knowledge to deliver 'Wow! quality work' is an essential component of an individual's growth. Always remember, if you can't live up to the expectation or even deliver more than what is expected, then someone else will!

Are you learning to live up to these expectations?

What have you learnt today? What have you learnt in the last one week, a month, an year?

What have you learnt which will help deliver more for your customers?

Action:

• Create a learning log. Write down what you learn every day. If you are not learning, it will show!
• Have a learning goal. What should you learn to deliver more and add more value to your work? Anticipate your future deliverables (short term and long term), analyze the industry trend, understand the customers' need and their business and design your own learning plan.
• Set timelines by which you would achieve these specific learning goals. Smart learning in quick time is the necessity of today.
• Track your learning on a regular basis. Are you progressing in the right path and on time?

You grow not by years of experience but by the knowledge you acquire and implement.

Keep learning. Keep growing.

I read Rajesh Setty's latest book #Th!nkTweet: Bite-sized lessons for a fast paced world! and re-read it the very next day.

It is packed with wisdom and the bite-sized lessons will provoke you to think and think again. The benefit of a book comes only when we take a learning out of it and then practice the insights in our daily life. This book shows the path to immense learning through 'bite-sized lessons', all written as tweets within 140 charecters. Indeed, Rajesh proves here that 140 charecters is enough to make us think.

This may be a small book which would take you just about an hour to read through but do not judge the book by its thickness. It is a book which should be read and re-read, to think, introspect and put the learning into practice. In todays world where time is most valuable, this book has a very high ROI for the time you spend on it. The tweets will provoke your thought and let you introspect on the way you live today!

Foreword by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says it all in a tweet - "#Th!nkTweet is a cool little book filled with twinsights, twumor, and twinfluence of Twitter."

I take another learning from this book 'project': Rajesh has been into tweeting since December 2008, that was about six months back, only. It is inspiring to see how he has been able to leverage the twitter platform to come up with his idea of publishing tweets in a book form. You can do wonders if you have the vision and you know where exactly you want to go.

You can follow Rajesh in twitter at @UpbeatNow

You can buy the book at Happy About (publisher) or Amazon.

To read more on this book and to follow the buzz around it, check Rajesh Setty's website. If you enjoy the book, let others know.

Thanks again Rajesh for this great book and wish all the success.

Enjoy reading and quick learning!

(Book cover photo source: rajeshsetty.com)