Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There’s No Such Thing as a Successful Year…
Ready, set, and go! The race of 2015 is off and running, as we buckle down to make this our most successful year ever – only there’s a hitch: there’s no such thing. You heard right; there’s no such thing as a successful year.
“How can you say such a thing,” you say. “Of course they exist; I’ve had many of them.”
I’m sure you’ve had, however not in the context you think you’ve had. We cannot say we’ve had a successful year because it’s simply not possible. A year is twelve months, composed of 52 weeks, consisting of 365 days, having 8760 hours, made up of 525,600 minutes, and comprised of 31,536,000 seconds. It’s impossible to live an entire year in a specific moment, so it’s not possible to have a successful year. What is possible though, is to live consecutive moments within that year, that may or may not be adequate to qualify for the label of a successful year.
Do you follow?
“Semantics,” you say? Maybe, but my goal isn’t to be coy, but rather to appreciate that so-called successful years are only possible by making each and every moment count within them. In other words, a successful year is composed of successful months, successful weeks, successful hours, successful minutes, and successful seconds. What we do in the here and now – in the present – determines whether or not a successful year will be had. The point is to value each second as it happens. Take care of the seconds, and the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years will take care of themselves.
Bestselling German author Eckhart Tolle said it well, “The power for creating a better future is in the present moment: you create a good future by creating a good present.”
So as we now venture off into the labyrinth that 2015 brings, we must bear in mind that with each second that passes, we determine whether or not this will be another so-called successful year. Its incumbent upon us not to waste the moments gifted us, as there’s only so many to go around (see Time: The Great Equalizer…). Time is precious; we must value it, if we want it to value us. Squander it, and it’s our greatest enemy; use it wisely, and it’s our greatest ally.
Let’s keep this in mind and hope that come New Year’s Eve 2015, we’ll be able to honestly say that we’ve made each and every second count, and that indeed 2015 was a year, in which we lived 31,536,000 seconds successfully.
See you at the finish line!
For more, check out The C.A.T. Principle: Change, Action, Trust – Words to Live By, a Global Ebook Awards GOLD First Place Winner for Best Non-Fiction Self-Help Ebook of 2014, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the latest Amazon reviews here.
Sign up above and receive this blog once every two weeks to your inbox. Comments and thoughts welcome.
Glad that I could spend some of those 31,536,000 seconds catching up with you today. Congratulations on winning the gold medal for your book. It was great to be able to chat in person with the author.
As you so aptly said, we have to make the most of the time that has been given to us.
For me the start of a year has always been a time to reflect so taking another look at the C.A.T. Principle is thought provoking and facilitates the process.
Thank you for the gift of your book to the world.