Success in Life

“I believe that anyone can be successful in life, regardless of natural talent or the environment within which we live. This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame, but adhering to God’s standards of truth, justice, humility, service, compassion, forgiveness, and love.”

This is what Jimmy Carter defined as “success in life”, in 50 words. And where did I find that? It’s in his book, Our Endangered Values, with the tagline American’s Moral Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2005, p. 28).

A similar set of values also permeates the Buddhist teachings, each cherished and to be practiced in our humanistic interactions with one another. So often we only pay lip service to this gold standard of moral behavior, while sidestepping it when it is inconvenient or expeditious.

At other times, we view ourselves as the only purveyor of truth, dispensing justice as we deem fit in the most dogmatic fashion. Those in high places put their needs, or rather wants, before those of the people they were elected to serve in the first place.

Then there is the NIMBY syndrome, out of sight, out of mind. We grow accustomed to the daily doses of life’s travesty spanning the newspaper pages, the atrocities flashing across the TV screens/computer monitors, the mental images vanished at the stroke of a switch.

Then we rationalize our apathy on having to make a living, preferring not to be overwhelmed by the enormity of it all by preoccupying ourselves within our confines. Oftentimes there is a lack of empathy, a failure to feel for the victims, for the vanquished, for the disenfranchised. It’s as if we are watching a movie, the human suffering occurring in a make-believe world on a two-dimensional rendering that is the celluloid.

But, does it have to be that way? For how long do we want to keep leaving to others to save the world, while unabashedly enjoying the fruits of their labor and sacrifice?

Sure, the effort of an individual seems almost pathetic or laughable, if you so inclined, in the face of the onslaught exacted by the crushing wheels of life’s injustice. But one human helped is, one human less to be helped who in turns is able to help another. And that reduces the suffering humans geometrically, much like a compound interest building up the capital (the humans able to help).

I think we need to start believing in ourselves, that what we do in our own way by adhering to the gold standard of moral living as espoused by Jimmy Carter, no matter how small our sphere of reach may seem, does matter, at the minimum to the ones we have helped directly. And let the power of compounding help spread like a progressive wave that radiates in all directions.

‘Think Globally, Act Locally.” That’s a slogan bandied about a long time ago. But that’s the paradigm that we need to imbue in ourselves, to reinforce our already frail psyche that the good deeds we do shall not be in vain.

A Chinese Buddhist adage that I’ve come across and that I’ve adopted as my motto in conducting my daily life, reads, literally translated:

“Do not neglect doing a good deed because it seems petty;
Nor commit an infraction because it is inconsequential.”

So it is not enough merely abstaining from doing the bad, we must also proactively do the good.

Let’s start/continue to do a good deed, at least once a day, be it giving way to another road user, donating to a worthy cause, greeting a stranger, doing more than your share of the work, volunteering in caring for the needy, be magnanimous in victory, and graceful in defeat.

And that is my humble recipe for being successful in life, in 50 words, or thereabout, straight from the gut.