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Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Don’t Aim at Success

September 4, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

To complement my recent articles on the futility of attachment to results and the need to focus on effort not on outcomes, here’s practical instruction from the highly-recommended “Man’s Search for Meaning”, the memoir of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl:

'Man's Search For Meaning' by Viktor Frankl (ISBN 0671023373) Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

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Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Attitudes, Success

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  1. Uma Maheswari says

    March 29, 2016 at 9:52 PM

    Thanks for bringing some joy in our busy world by your posts. Let me to know some more …..

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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