Monday, September 8

Success & Meaning

How I define my success:
  1. How well am I interacting with those I am close to.
  2. Working to ameliorate the suffering of others, and helping them grow.
  3. How big my DVD collection is.
Okay, so number three creeps in there once in a while.

Nothing is more important to me in terms of personal success than learning to be a better partner or father or friend, through working on being less defensive, more considerate, and softer in my interactions. 

Secondly, working to help others grow is also important to me. As I discussed last week, that all truth is a part of the gospel, I consider anything that helps someone to grow to be the same as "missionary work." Meeting someone in their sphere of life and promoting their growth within it, whether through a friendship or therapy is meaningful to me.

As for number three, I'm going to write this above my DVD cabinet:
"Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."


How do you define success? What in your life gives you meaning?

14 comments:

  1. Can you really consider yourself successful while owning that many episodes of Smallville and not having a single season of Arrested Development?

    I think that kind of makes you out to be a total failure. (sorry to crush the self-esteeme)

    :)

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  2. Haha not so fast Salty. Look a little closer, I do have season two!

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  3. My definition of success would be similar on all 3 counts (with minor changes on the second one: raising happy, healthy contributing children). You're not a TOTAL failure in the DVD area, but you have work to do. We don't have nearly as many TV seasons, but we have 230 just in movies. :)

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  4. Yes, of course. Raising child(ren) is definitely up there... probably in number one and two. In the case of our son, maybe number three as well, lol. Actually he only gets to watch something (usually signing time) every other day, for only about 30 min.

    I think I only have 120 or so movies... Most of my stuff was on sale or pretty cheap though. Example, the aforementioned Arrested Development season was only 9.99 at Target. I'm kind of a deal hound for DVDs. One time I got 5 used movies at Hastings for $10. Not bad eh?

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  5. I just ordered 'Michael' from Amazon, $9.95. Rotten Tomatoes gave it only a 37%. John Travolta is an angel seeking redemption through character improvement having an assignment here on earth among mortals. I have to laugh a little extra because two very good friends of mine, who are stout Catholics, went to see it thinking it was a religious movie. They walked out before it was half over and wanted their money back.

    The message is the same for all us. Try to help 'Happy the Man' to appreciate the Boss. Seriously, it is what you have enumerated - it is about love. 'And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make', I think.

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  6. As I've already stated, it's not something that can be changed. I'm not attracted to men and I can't like the boss. These things are never going to change in this life time. FYI, I hated "Michael" too though "Phenomenon" is an excellent Travolta movie...

    Here is something positive that I'll say for the boss, something that I can appreciate about him. He had a dream, he pursued it, he worked hard at it and he's had great success. He magnified his calling, developed his talents (not that I think he has any but obviously many people do). George and WP, have I appeased you because that's as appreciative as I'm going to be on that subject? I just really don't like his voice nor his music, and I can't change that, I don't want to change that any more than I want to change my sexual orientation.

    What is success: hard to measure it really, that's why we don't judge others. There is only one who can judge our success since we're all given different talents/gifts and abilities. But I would say doing whatever we need to do to be exalted and helping whomever we can along the way to get there too. And fortunately for the Atonement we have "do-overs".

    That was kind of an obvious answer but it was a real general question, so... I still need to address that "wisdom" topic that we were discussing. I'll try to get a post out there in the next week. I know you're trying to provoke deeper thought here with this post but it's just a little too broad I think. So then you get the obvious Sunday school answers, "faith", "prayer", "scriptures", "obedience", etc.

    I have many DVDs, I don't have a lot of time to watch them which makes me wonder why I have them. Especially after having recently moved, I'm questioning why I have a lot of things, why do I keep moving this crap around and why do I think I need it??? If you never move, you don't have to answer these questions. We had lot's of built-ins in our previous house and now I've got boxes and boxes of DVDs and nowhere to put them so currently they are Here on our mantel...

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  7. My little ones kept digging them (DVDs) out of the boxes and making a huge mess playing with them as though they were dominoes/blocks/legos so I had to put them up high :)

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  8. Happy,
    I am in awe of your collection! You are definitely successful in my book! :)

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  9. It is very difficult not to accumulate stuff either willingly / consciously (cycling and camping gear) or less willingly / unconsciously (piles of paper), but I would like to measure my ultimate success by the amount of stuff I can get rid of. When you get to be my age, which is very, very old, you grow weary of the burden of many possessions. Hence the benefits of having things like an iPod Shuffle and a titanium spork, because they are really no burden at all, for example. Someone at a meeting I recently attended had one of those newer Mac stealth laptops that are so thin you can't see them from the side. She must feel very unburdened indeed.

    I may have to defer my ultimate success until my Amazon.com wishlist can be shortened a little. Then I'll really be able to focus on becoming successful.

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  10. More than scriptures, faith, obedience, the atonement and all of the other Christian and Mormon religiosity topics it is as Jesus and Mother Theresa taught. It is about service to others. Jesus asked, 'who is my neighbor?' That is an ultimate question that should burn within us. If you cannot answer that then we are failures.

    "In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Mother Theresa

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  11. "What in your life gives you meaning?"

    My family, my religion, my job - and not much else - not even the collection of tapes and DVD's (I'm an old fart; I have an excuse for having more tapes than DVD's.) that puts all of you to shame. (I probably have as many Disney films alone as most of you have DVD's total.)

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  12. I'm old enough to have my share of tapes too. Had to replace all of them with DVDs of course. But I like them still because the little ones can put them in and swap them out on their own without destroying them too much... The boxes/jackets haven't fared very well though.

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  13. Agreed on the value of tapes. I learned that lesson early on when my daughter snapped our Monsters Inc dvd in half.

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