Sometimes we get overwhelmed thinking of how we could be able to reached success. However, its not just about reaching your goal thats important, its actually the process of how to get there.and we have to realize that a journey to a life time begins with a single step.

Thanks for this post.

We all just have to learn to enjoy wherever we are at the moment, rather than constantly being dissatisfied with where we are not. It’s like taking a stroll down the river, but being unhappy because you’re not at the destination yet. I say… brave the currents and enjoy the ride.

Three years ago, at the age of 19, I had lung surgery of a spontaneously collapsed left lung. After number of recurrences over the past 3 years, it took me out again about two months ago and my surgeon said that I would have to have a much bigger surgery to prevent it from happening again. I’m ridiculously active and last term I was working at 200% for 3 months straight (unbelievably productive but very unbalanced) so I was not happy, to say the least, that I’d have to have surgery.

Eleven days ago I had open lung surgery–a procedure that’s harder to recover from and more painful than open heart surgery–but it’s shown me something that almost no one gets the chance to experience and that even fewer take advantage of given the opportunity.

I had about 6 weeks of downtime during which I couldn’t do anything because of my collapsed lung. During the first two weeks, I was stagnate and borderline depressed because of the situation I was thrust into. After those couple of weeks, I decided I had to make a choice: either give it everything I had and make the best of the situation or I wouldn’t recover from the surgery and I would be basically crippled and in pain for the rest of my life.

For the next two weeks, I did hours and hours of research on everything related to my surgery/recovery including hours of questioning surgeons and specialists. Then, the two weeks before surgery, because there was literally nothing out there about dealing with the day-to-day of pre/post-op from major surgeries, I decided to video blog my experience to help others. I’m 11 days out of surgery and no one, including my doctors or myself, can believe how well and how fast I’m recovering.

I tell this story because I no longer think happiness is a matter of celebrating both successes and failures–this is still thinking in terms of success and failure, which I think is a false dichotomy. Rather, living in the moment and not thinking in terms of success and failure has really brought me the most meaning and happiness.

The self-improvement world seems to be stuck in this weird, nebulous world of meta-experience–there are so many strategies and perspectives that we apply to our experience when it should really be the other way around. I’ve realized that it’s very self limiting to confine myself to thinking in terms of success and failure because it’s like choosing between a hamburger or a hot dog in an entire world of food.

I fully agree in that we need to take the time to celebrate our accomplishments. Pushing past our comfort zones and making improvements is never enjoyable, but only staying in that state of discomfort is never the end goal. The end goal is to push past those comfort levels so that we are able to enjoy more. It’s a shame that people will keep themselves in that state of discomfort just for the sake of “personal development” without ever taking the time to realize how far they’ve come and enjoy it. Again, great post!

Take care,
Ben