Success Should Feel Normal

If your success feels like an impossible dream too good to be true, it probably is. It should feel normal. Your greatest dream, your most treasured aspiration come to life should feel like 'just another one'. You should expect these to happen, as well. In my opinion (and I think there is enough fact to back this up as well), people who do not expect to reach the summit usually do not, and if they do, it is short-lived at best. It is not wrong to celebrate success but usually heavy or over-celebration comes from people who do not see themselves as deserving or as a deeply successful person.

There is a concept in spiritual literature called 'excess potential'. When we are focusing our efforts on a particular outcome or result, we increase, not only the likeliness of it happening, but also of it not happening, because our fixation taken to extremes leads us away from thoughts, speech, and behavior that would be adopted by someone who already possessed this accomplishment. Put simply, someone who is already rich does not need to desperately focus on making lots of money at the expense of all else; only someone who is lacking in money, or has the self-image of someone lacking in money, would do such a thing.

The biggest and most elusive part of all achievement is adopting the thoughts, speech and actions of the person we most hope to become, ahead of the actual evidence. This involves seeing ourselves in a new way, acting in new ways to familiar situations, recognizing patterns of thought and action and changing unhelpful ones at the root instead of glossing over them with commonly accepted, but wrong, behavior. Desire is an important part of achieving, but even desire must be balanced: an desperate drive to succeed indicates that things are wrong, whether they be internal or external, and they need fixing.

For instance, to win a championship belt, trophy, prize, etc., we must conduct ourselves like a champion, 24/7, daily, long before we even see one up for grabs. Champions do have the desire to win, but it is not the overly-consuming madness that plagues a contender; the champion knows they are a champion, the contender has an untested belief that they could possibly be champion but no one knows for sure. The champion must know they are a champ ahead of the physical evidence, they must conduct their lives like champions everyday, every hour until they are presented with the material copy of it. This means that "longing for it" is off the table. "Being it" is the only option on the menu. You must make your life a parallel of the one you desire in order to see it materialize.

To the truly successful man or woman, big wins, like big losses, is "how the game goes". They identify themselves as successful, so the idea of them winning is not a once-in-a-lifetime shot, it's who they are and who they expect themselves to be. This is part of the reason why "wanting desperately" often pushes away what you want; it's a separate object, a dream, something incompatible with who you are. It is possible that you need to change "who you are" to a concept more conducive to not only getting but keeping what you desire, and keeping what you desire means normalizing it.

If you get it and it feels like a lucky shot, you know you haven't done the right work inside to make you attractive enough to keep this success around. All of your wins and all of your losses should feel like 'no big deal'. Everything should feel ordinary and commonplace: maybe in loss a small dip, or in wins a small joy, but a centered, "middle way" feeling is tantamount to inner success.