It’s well said by our education, our culture and our surroundings that success is evaluated by money, status, fame, and power. If we take a look into the definition of success we’ll see that is, in fact, the perseverance of an activity done by an individual seeking a known or an unknown goal and achieving it.
Success can come in different ways: getting that job you wanted, selling an app, or building a great startup. Success may simply come in the form of helping a stranger, educating a child, finishing a book or supporting someone when they are in fear. As we know, going from sadness or fear, to happiness and balance, can make your life a success story.
The idea of success can be a utopia that maybe we can never reach. As we get closer to it, the balance between ourselves and others can be violated by the sacrifices we might need to make.
The idea of success is to try to handle it long-term, so this balance and goals that we want achieve are valued by ourselves in a positive and honest way.
Let’s think about a car. It has one goal: to go from point A to point B. Machines are efficient when only one goal is involved. For example, a robot that climbs stairs would be more efficient than one who tries to climb stairs and make pancakes at the same time.
Our brains are big and we are multi-talented from the moment we are born. We can work, we can speak, we can love, we can write, we can plan and we can see. So, the price for being generalists is that we’re going to be worse in one of many activities, contrary to a person that only worked at one thing their whole life.
We can feel bad at the end of the day for not being good at different things. That is the consequence of a very wise choice we made: exchanging total focus and perfection with breadth and variety.
Society tells us that we can do everything and be successfull in every aspect. We are told to feel that we can have the work-life balance by having a perfectly optimal career and a perfectly optimal home life. However, this is unrealistic because everything worth fighting and working for will undoubtedly unbalance each of our lives.
If we are having trouble managing multiple activities, we’re not perfect at some scenes of our lives, or feel we’re making mistakes, that’s okay; our lives shouldn’t be perfect.
We have just successfully opted for an imperfect variety over a flawless focus.