Are You on the Wrong Side of Life?!

If a feeling of despair and hopelessness keeps visiting you, or if you sense that you are at the wrong helm of the ship of life, then learn from these people, who tried to clear up this problem and overcame the difficulties that stood across their paths.

I heard of a physician who lived in a city of no fewer than eight thousand souls, and who left it to work in a small village. His act stirred an uproar and questioning, not in medical circles alone but among laymen and the general public. Some asked: Was he not successful in his profession? Others said: Was his income small, so that he feared losing the respect of his fellow citizens? And what does he hope for by moving to that remote village? But the answer of one wise man was that every man's life is a notebook in which he sets down story after story, and the meanest — nay, the hardest — hour of his life is when he compares it with the goals he is seeking. These words were spoken out of insight and experience. How many of us measure success by money or by power, or by the two combined! Do you not measure a person's success by the standing he has won, or by the size and splendor of his automobile? But can we confine success to material gains alone? ...

One scholar defined the word “success” as the excellence that sheds vitality upon everything, even the simplest matters, so that it makes all eyes yearn toward its charms and turns baseness into nobility. In the light of this belief public opinion takes its direction: the winning gambler and swindler is counted successful so long as he is not sent to prison; and if that great merchant or that high official breaks the law, he is successful, for his position defends and protects him. And if the fame spreads of a benefactor who happened by chance to give alms to a needy man — is he to be counted successful?

Each of us has goals he strives to realize, wrestling to overcome every obstacle that opposes him; and he may lose the delight of victory in the harshness of the struggle, arriving with his strength shattered and his resolve crushed.

Many brilliant young men have stopped to review their progress, and that one glance was enough to change the direction of their thinking. The philosopher Schopenhauer was the son of a rich man; had he followed him, he could have lived a life of comfort and ease.

But his ambition reached further than that, and he turned to the study of medicine, which he later abandoned for philosophy.

This thinker put the essence of his spirit into his first book. Many called him the pessimist philosopher, yet a great number of readers value his saying that life's misery and its appetites have no end. Happiness, in his view, is not to be found in joy, which is nothing but the momentary satisfaction of appetite; for a man to attain happiness he must renounce all his appetites, arriving at something resembling Buddhism.

This idea that Schopenhauer proposes may not be a true foundation for happiness; yet the thirst for self-denial does work upon the decisions of the ambitious, and may bring them down from the seats of their success.

Many women seek a life of quiet and settledness in the family after strong draughts of life's clamor and glitter; and in this they show they know that the warmth and heat the sun bestows are not to be found in artificial lights — just as many prominent actresses leave fame behind and hasten to settle down at the side of an unassuming husband.

Only a minority of people are content with their present and their work; even the most important industrialists and officials feel this, and lose their drive and their enthusiasm for going on in life. I heard of a man who became the owner of a huge store after leaving the university, but who felt an inner ambition pushing him in another direction: he loved conducting, and wished to become the leader of some band. And in fact he became the conductor of a musical band; he left the store and followed the fame he had won without great toil — and it is certain that he does not regret what he did.

Many have refused the familiar kind of success, for all manner of ends. So we have the right to ask ourselves: what, then, is true success? Is it money, or power and dominion? Or is it something unnamed, and greater than the two together? ...