Pursue Success....or Just Grow Into It?

Before anyone asks, I understand that LinkedIn.com is a social network that focuses on professional networking and career development but, but they offer an opportunity to blog……...

I'm not presenting anything here for debate. I thought I might find like-minded people who want to perhaps explore the elusiveness of success as the world defines it relative to the journey to success as it grows out of a heart that yearns for peace, comfort, joy in everything we do.

I write, not ‘hoping’ that people read my thoughts so that I can feel validated when someone agrees with me or debate my position when someone does not. I serve a King in Heaven and try and do all things in love the way He teaches me to. I have been given much and would now consider myself to be a very rich man – not prosperous but extremely wealthy.

I write because I have important things to share with my business/professional sojourners who are in the trenches, marred by sweat and fears - striving so hard for a measure of success that will satiate the hunger in a heart that drives our spirits. I have submitted to a greater purpose and now spend my days trying to figure out how to serve others, not by making myself small and insignificant but by lifting other's needs above my own. I have become fascinated with the purpose of: "providing extraordinary care while serving others in their time of need."

My fascination goes way, way beyond providing extraordinary care to customers and clients but given that this is a professional networking and career development site, I will endeavor to keep my thoughts focused on the commonality of that thread that runs between us.

Since this is the first of a few articles I may write regarding this subject matter, it is important that I set the table regarding expectations. As I write, some of my personal philosophies might spill over (my passion sometimes makes me messy) but we can always retreat back to the root of my purpose for starting a blog in the first place: I want you to know that you are worthy of being provided extraordinary care and I will endeavor to serve you in a time of need. In the business world, we are on the journey together and I look to walk beside you in the hope that we might be able to help each other finish well.

Like you, in my pursuit of 'success', I was tripped up, hit by setbacks, suffering and even mini-disasters along the journey and had I become disoriented by all of those experiences and let them invalidate who I am, my dreams may may have succumbed to the grinding, unrelenting pressures. I may have come to believe what the world wants me to believe: I'm unimportant and won't ever really amount to much.

But blessed man that I am, my dreams didn't die and here I am to share my insight into what success looks like that I can only describe as treasures of a far better kind than business success and prosperity.

My name is Richard Green and I am an Owner, President and CEO of Paul Davis Ottawa. Perhaps that title sounds impressive to some but please, it doesn't come close to describing who I am.

As I look towards the setting sun of my career, I find myself contemplating life and all the choices I made during my journey to get to this place in life. Perhaps you're just starting out, half way up the ladder or find yourself at the top. From my perspective, there's never a bad time to take some time and consider the following:

Between life and death, we human beings have nothing but time, time which must be served and spent while we live. We fill the time with work, with relationships, and with various pleasures and pursuits. We fill the time, we waste the time, we strive desperately not to be at loose ends with our time. Many of us in the pursuit of business success believe there are not enough hours in a day. My, the time flies! My, where did the day go?

To the extent that the effort produced by our time-filling and time-wasting business activities is directed towards being ‘successful’, our quest never seems to get us all the way to our ‘happy’ place. For many, it seems that the harder we toil to find it, the more easily it eludes us.

Turning the dreams of our heart into goals and objectives and performance measurement and relationships (personal and business both) requires a lot of striving and offers up only little pieces of satisfaction along the way.

If we sit back and take the time to contemplate the definition of success, we may very well recognize that as wealth grows and small victories accumulate, worry begins to manifest itself because success by nature is vulnerable to loss and even when closely and diligently guarded, it never does lose its fragility. The closer we get to the goal, the more we are subjected to obstacles of greater concentration and intensity making things that much more difficult to achieve.

In the business world, it is good to back up and reexamine your strategic plan and make sure it still lines up with your vision and mission and everything you want out of life. I pulled the following question out of the Bible because it is relative to everything I've written here.

In context, it isn't speak to religion or faith. It's a question asked to incite us to look inward and examine what it is we're really trying to get out of the time we've been given. The question reads:

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world [wealth, fame, success], but forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Is the answer clear before you?

(I'm no photographer but the picture in my header is one I took on my way to work one morning. I had left home and saw it in my rear-view mirror. I was captivated and watched as the mist burned off by the sun rising on a new day)