Timeline of Success

Evaluating your direction in life

The Usual Story

“Everyone you meet always asks if you have a career, are married or own a house as if life was some kind of grocery list. But no one asks if you are happy.” - Heath Ledger

• Go to school

• Find a job

• Get married

• Have kids

• Work hard

• Cash out your pension

• Enjoy the life you have left (assuming you’re healthy enough to do so)

• Die

This is an old paradigm that I completely disagree with because it’s assuming that everyones definition of success is the same.

It overlooks one vital question: is it making you happy?

I was recently at a friend’s bachelor party and one of the guy’s jokingly said, “it’s only downhill from here!”.

Why? Why does it have to be downhill after you get married?! Where are these narratives coming from?!

There are so many predetermined stories about how life is expected to be that we blindly just believe them and create the same reality as everyone else and wonder why we’re not happy.

It’s like we’re born and then automatically join a conveyer belt where things are just done to us and we have to accept it. It’s those who are brave enough and curious enough to get off the conveyer belt that find true fulfilment and peace because they create their own definition of success.

Instead of speeding up I think there is great value in slowing down to evaluate how happy you actually are. To review all areas of your life to see if they are truly in alignment with your soul because your soul came here to express itself in a unique way.

Last week I was at a retreat with my coach in Ireland and on one of the journals he gave us he had this quote printed on the front:

Quarter Life Crisis

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” - Joseph Campbell

A midlife crisis happens because you realise how far out of alignment your life is.

But it can also happen earlier in life.

For me, that’s what happened.

In my early 20s I graduated from law school but there was something within me telling me it wasn’t the right direction to go in. I knew deep down it wasn’t what I was meant to do. There was something more for me out there but I just didn’t know exactly what it was yet.

I began following whatever excited me. I tried lots of things.

I kept my retail job and created a couple of iPhone apps. When that failed, I started my own Amazon affiliate websites. When that failed, I started a blog. When that didn’t get any traction, I started an eBay store. When I got blacklisted on eBay (because I was selling branded merchandise without a license lol), I got a sales job to build skills in an area that I felt would help me develop my strengths. I then started my podcast. I attended seminars and got mentorship about business.

I never gave up.

I kept following the thread that life was laying out before me even if it seemed illogical. Meanwhile, everyone else was getting promoted in their corporate careers, getting married, having kids and buying their first home. I went head first into figuring out who I am and what I’m meant to be doing with my life.

In The End

“You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You’re going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it.” - Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

In the end, life isn’t about speed but the direction in which you go. If you’re going fast in the wrong direction you’re not making progress because you’ll be left unfulfilled.

Life is about living as authentically as you can each step of the way. Making conscious and intentional choices about everything.

Don’t follow people blindly.

Check in with your intuition and see what feels good to you even if it seems wrong to everyone else.

Be the who creates an entirely new life and breaks the existing patterns in your family and in society.

Sometimes things don’t happen in the order you think they are meant to. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Let go of needing to reach certain milestones by a certain age. Living linear like that causes so much anxiety because it makes life a race. Life isn’t a race. It’s a journey to be explored and enjoyed. It’s about the path you create along the way and the sights you see and the things you experience, not how quickly you get to the end.

At the end of your life what matters isn’t going to be how quickly you completed everything, but how much of it you truly discovered and enjoyed along the way.

Journal Prompts

1. What does success feel like for you?

2. Whose criticism are you most afraid of?

3. What do you imagine as a beautiful life for yourself?

1 thing i’m loving right now

I’m loving the quality time I’ve had with friends recently. True authentic connection is important to my mental health and I’m grateful for the friends I have in my life. This is a picture of me in Croatia after I’d finished a swim and a cave dive in the Adriatic Sea with friends a couple weeks ago.

One love,

V

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I regularly share short solo episodes and longer guest conversations on my podcast Soul Wisdom Stories. You can listen here