Smart Quote of the Week

Success is a journey, not a destination - Zig Ziglar

And here we are at the end of the month. Today I am focused on success and whai it means. Bottom line–success is different for everyone. It’s the journey, the striving for whatever we think of as success, that is important. The learning, the challenges we face, the growing faith in our abilities–those are the real win when we go after a dream. When one dream is realized, there will be more behind it. The well-lived life is filled with them.

We build faith in ourselves by striving beyond what we believe ourselves to be capable of. By surviving difficult situations. We may emerge bruised and battered, but as the saying goes– “what does not kill us makes us stronger.” Every time we refuse to give up, we succeed. That doesn’t mean our goals can't shift or change. In fact, they should evolve with experience. That is part of growing into the best people we can be.

Life is a bit like a maze–the going is smooth until we run into an obstacle, forcing us to pivot in another direction. Sometimes the obstacles are external and sometimes they are internal. Sometimes they knock us back hard and sometimes we brush them off.

Humans are complex beings, and therefore so are our lives. We are both messy and beautiful, and always, always interesting.

(I have to admit I had not heard of Zig Ziglar before I found this quote. He got his start as a self-help and motivational speaker while a salesman with Wearever Cookware and was one of the founders of American Salesmasters, an organization created to uplift the image of sales people that ended up reaching far beyond his target audience.)