Success is Always Challenged

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Are you or someone you may know successful? Do other people recognize this success? Are you or they ever challenged because of your or their success?

It seems as though the more successful you become, the more people will challenge your ideas and thoughts. Does the challenge stem from the personal gratification of the challenger justifying their lack of success? Is the challenger trying to make themselves feel better about their life by challenging others?

I believe the thought stems from one word, jealousy. Humans are jealous by nature, they want more, more, more. People constantly think and look after themselves, and themselves alone. They compare themselves to other people and wonder, why is this girl successful and why am I not? Everything is a competition and they start rationalizing, making lists of that person's negatives; All they care about is themselves. They work too hard. The list is never ending.

I am one to always do my best at everything. I search out the best possible solution to everything and execute. Living this way has done me well and recently attitudes have changes about me from others. I have the same personality but certain success attributes are become more apparent, not in terms of lavish, material items, but underlying things like job experiences, investment opportunities, etc. There is now a constant challenge of my ideas, anger from others for not being included in certain investments, and fierce competition.

It is a constant battle and the resolution is difficult. Do you stop talking about investments with certain people? Do you keep your business to yourself with certain people? Do you not talk about your work life? Do you not talk about your future dreams and goals? It is certainly a challenge worth looking at.

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

I have recently starting reading (listening actually from the audiobook) The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It's been a thought-changing book so far and he has a lot of great ideas to tackle your fears and your passions in life. He started off working in an office like many Americans and made a dramatic change to alter his life and travel the world, all the while working only 4-hours on his own businesses.

His book is broken out into the following chapters:

Definition means to figure out what a person wants, get over fears, see past society's "expectations", and figure out what it will really cost to get where a person wants to go.

Elimination is about time management, or rather about not managing time. This is achieved applying the 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. There's a difference, Ferriss says, between efficiency and effectiveness. The books emphasis is on effectiveness.

Automation is about building a sustainable, automatic source of income. This includes techniques such as drop-shipping, automation, Google Adwords and Adsense and outsourcing.

Liberation is dedicated to the successfully automated of one's lifestyle and the liberatation from a geographical location and job. Incidentally, Ferriss notes that if somebody has a regular job, the order of steps will be DELA, not DEAL.

The book asserts that technology such as email, instant messaging and internet-enabled pda's complicate life rather than simplify it. It advocates hiring virtual assistants from developing countries such as India to free up personal time.

Source: Wikipedia

Timothy Ferriss also writes a blog and maintains a website. Check them out! You can also check out my previous post - Timothy Ferriss, American Author and Speaker.

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The Secret to Happiness is No Secret

See The 'secret' to happiness... is no secret at The Financial Philosopher.

The blog post gives some great advice on finding happiness from the following quotes:

• "Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy." ~ Lau-tzu

• "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• "My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it." ~ Chuang Tzu

• "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires." ~ Epicurus

• "Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you will miss it. For success, like happiness, can not be pursued; and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see -- in the long run, I say! -- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it." ~ Viktor Frankl