Success Crucible

It’s early in the morning on December 27th as I write this. My three boys are asleep in their beds, dreaming–I hope–about wonderful things and re-enacting the fun we have had this week with family and friends. Every day has been truly great this week, running from our house to a family member’s house, eating food, celebrating the one time of year when most of our family is together. I wouldn’t do it any other way. To quote Margie, “I love to create the magic of the season.”

In the early morning…and sometimes, late at night…I sit down and think about how grateful I am. I think about all the stuff that I have acquired over the years. Yeah..that’s right, the physical stuff. I am proud of the fact that I own, for instance, a Fender Princeton Reverb amplifier that I have wanted since I was 19. I am proud that my vehicle is newer and has a warranty. I am proud of the house I have for my children.

Now…before you go casting me as a materialistic curmudgeon who should be haunted by three spirits to redeem his humanity, let me beg for a minute more of suspended judgment.

My point is that we are never really just one thing. I love my kids. I love the holidays. I love sitting on the couch and meditating. But, I also love that I have nice stuff. Perhaps that makes me a bad person. In fact, my liberal arts education would suggest that it does. I remember reading Cicero in college and learning that the key to “good life” was embracing the intangibles (friendship, love, family, etc.) and finding wealth in them. And I do. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” taught the futility of seeking only a “shadow” of the form of perfection. And…yet…as I write this post, I feel like if I am being genuinely grateful this holiday season, I need to say that I feel grateful for the “stuff.”

I have to work at this feeling though because there is a strange cultural pressure to “either” be a family person “or” pursue wealth. It’s okay to be “both, and” and not “either, or.” I am “both” a happy dad, who finds joy in spending time with my family, “and” I enjoy the fruits of my labor in the sense that I like “stuff.”

When I was younger, I even imagined this dichotomy as a major life decision: You chase money or happiness. The truth is that I was young and binary in my thinking. The fact that I was interested in having a family and I was interested in being successful was okay…and maybe even more than okay. But no one ever told me that…they told me either outwardly or subconsciously that to want both was selfish, and potentially perilous. “People who seek money, get punished,” I once heard in a sermon. It stuck with me.

I don’t want that for my kids because it became my limit. I only explored occupations that seemed safe and “family friendly,” i.e. teaching, because that was what “good hearted” people did. And, to be fair, I loved it. I met some truly wonderful young people and got to have incredible conversations about writing and literature. I don’t regret that. I’m not sure, though, if I had to do it over again that I would make the same career choice. I think I would give more thought to what I wanted, how I wanted to live, and what it was that I wanted out of a career.

Personally, I enjoyed teaching because each day was a new adventure that required me to create new materials to meet new challenges. I liked the entrepreneurial mindset that I had to have in the classroom. I enjoyed creating, testing, revising, and measuring. It was great. What I found more tiring, and I continue to grapple with this, was the constant giving of myself. Teachers are on at all times, and they can never really focus on anything for very long because there are constant disruptions in the school day–bells, meetings, student discussions, etc. As a result, we are constantly trying to figure things out on the fly because we just didn’t have enough time to get materials perfected. It’s rather exhausting. On top of that, and I realize this has become a bit of a cliche, teachers’ salaries are not balanced with the amount of education they are required to have, which means that the household budget is tight. Those are real stressors that “good-hearted” people also have to deal with. Those have been things that I have had to deal with.

I want my kids to do it differently. I want them to know that it’s okay to want both material success and philosophical happiness. I want them to see the world as full of opportunities and places where good people can make a comfortable living and leave a lasting mark on world happiness. I want them to realize there is nothing wrong with a job that has a high salary, that it doesn’t mean they have “sold out” or become part of the evil empire. I want them to know that the most important thing a person can do in this world is to be true to themselves, to own their own ideas and follow their own instincts. I did not. I thought I had to do what was “acceptable” and what other people thought was right for me. In an effort to not sell my soul into the prison of success, I became a prisoner of my own thinking. Jailed by the binary version of life.

Here is my New Year’s challenge for you all. How can you disabuse yourself of thinking that limits your growth? How can you shed your psychological baggage in 2023 in a way that allows you to grow in a new way that you have not yet yourself explored? How can you evaluate your life in terms of how you want to live, and not how someone else wants you to live? How can you stop telling yourself what you can’t do, what you can’t become, what you can’t achieve; and start telling yourself what you can do, what you are, what you want to become?

How different would your life be if you did that? How different would our world be? Personally, I think it’s worth considering.

Cheers!