Happiness or success? Why is it that so often we must make this choice? From my first meetings with high school guidance counselors I was told if I was to be successful I should choose from certain career paths because I was adept at them. The issue was that although I was adept at them they did not truly make me happy. So what does a teenager or young adult do? In my case I choose to follow the responsible path. To do what I was told was the correct path to be successful. What I discovered was that as hard as I worked I never seemed to have the passion that my successful friends seemed to revel in. I was a hard worker but with money and success as my primary motivators there was no true passion for what I was doing. I always seemed to not quite reach the level I wanted to attain.
This was the point of my life where I started learning what synchronicity was. Swiss psychologist Carl G Jung coined the term to describe “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” or “meaningful coincidences”. In a nutshell the idea is that when you are on course to achieve a goal, help will inexplicably appear along the way to make sure you arrive. As hokey as this may sound the first thing I have found about this is that I have been on the recieving side too many times to doubt the veracity of this concept. The second is that the more committed to your goal the more likely you are to be affected by synchronous event. When we are doing things that make us happy we are much more likely to be truly committed to them.
In making these discoveries I realized that I had chosen the wrong path. That if I wanted to be successful I had to choose happiness first. Success would follow. Happiness and success are not mutually exclusive as so often shown in our rat race paced world. But our society often teaches us to chase them in the wrong order.
I was taught that if you work hard you will become successful and that will lead to happiness. What I have found as I have lived my life is that if you do the things that make you happy success will naturally follow.