KNOW WHAT MATTERS MOST
By Bill Cottringer

Today—because of technology’s speed, accessibility and capacity—we are all overloaded with too much to know. We are in desperate need of simplifying filters to make all this plethora of information more manageable and consumable. Take the important topic of “success” as a good example. You get over 400 million hits with this key word on a Google search. How long would that take for a normal reader to plow through, or how many lifetimes should I say?

A good question to ask is, “What basic things do we need to know about anything to be more successful in achieving the level of success that brings us what we think we want?” Even though that question starts to redefine “success,” and open up more questions, it is the start to the process of narrowing massive knowledge down to sort the gold from the sand. We are really looking for the free 5% truth hidden away in the 95% nonsense people are selling.

What is the most important thing to know about success? It is important to know how to be successful because that knowledge shapes the very quality of every moment of our lives and all the other lives we touch. Everyone and everything is driven to be successful and to be successful you have to know what matters most about being successful.

The best thing we can do is come up with a definition of success simple enough to learn more about how to get it. Try this definition out for that purpose:

Success = “Making the right choices to think, feel and act in the ways that help you get from where you are to where you where you want to be—with as much good feelings of love, happiness, peace, understanding, contentment, achievement, meaning, satisfaction and wholeness that you can have.”

So the first thing to know about success is what is it? That is probably an individual quest to get your arms around, because we can spend a lifetime chasing after something others define for us, just to get close enough to it to know enough about it to be able to get some of it. Personally, I just see success as me making my best effort to improve any situation that I am part of right now. This is kind of like making a 10-mile journey with a flashlight shining on your footsteps. It is also focusing more on the journey than the destination. Step-by-step you will get there.

The start to defining success for yourself is to make a list of the most important things you think you want and then ask why you want these things (what is the end result of having them) until you can’t answer why anymore. Probably you will get to the point of discovering that what you want is a positive, undeniable, intrinsic feeling that confirms you have these things you want and have made the right choices to think, feel and act in ways to get them. Or more simply put, you have moved into better alignment with the way life works. Now this may be the most important thing to know about success!

You can’t be more successful than life is being so why not follow that model? Learning how life operates to be so successful results in knowing what matters most about life. How is life so successful? Here’s how:

1. Life’s grand success is just a collection of everybody and everything’s collective contribution. We all make an important little success contributions to the team’s overall results. Knowing how you fit into all this is something worth knowing. But then again that knowledge doesn’t always come quickly or easily. The best start is to ask the right questions about this. What is my purpose? Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? How do I know if I am doing it right? What am I getting out of it? The best answers come from focused observation, stillness and quiet listening, especially in nature.

2. Being successful definitely involves following your passions and purpose and doing what you love to do. That usually involves learning what matters most in being successful, practicing it to be successful yourself and then teaching that wonderful knowledge to others so we can all be more successful in understanding life and people and start making our success contributions, step-by-step.

3. You do have to do a certain amount of thinking about this all to understand it well enough to be successful in applying it in real time, to be successful in closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and receive all the good feelings that movement brings. But, there comes a point where you realize you finally know what you need to know and then just “do it.” And that means no noisy trying, doubting, second guessing yourself or waiting for inspiration.

4. It is really ironic that all we are doing here is remembering the knowledge we were born with, which continually shows itself all around us. Sometimes you just have to see past what you are looking at, to discover the most important thing you need to know to be successful—you have to work harder at failing, than succeeding. Succeeding is the way of life, not failing. We fail only to know the difference and once we learn that important lesson, there are no more reasons for failing or feeling the feelings we are trying to avoid.

Bill Cottringer is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue WA. Enjoying nature at his river home in North Bend, he writes about being successful so readers can enjoy the feelings they get from making progress at moving from where they are at to where they want to be. His latest book is Doing What Matters Most. He can be reached at bcottringer.pssp.net or 425-454-5011 for comments and questions.