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For greater than two a long time, I have had the opportunity to work with dozens of CEOs and high-net-worth individuals to help them achieve their business, personal, and lifestyle goals—in part by creating benchmark projects that have lasting impact.
One of the most significant things I have learned from this work is that there are distinct differences between happiness and success, and that understanding this difference is crucial to achieving personal and business success.
Because while happiness is vital, it’s often fleeting—whether you’re feeling it after a big sale, a solid third-quarter performance, or getting a promotion. It makes you’re feeling good, because it should, but in the future, it doesn’t change anything significant about how you reside your day-to-day life. It’s like a hit of dopamine—it normally wears off as quickly because it comes.
Fulfillment, on the other hand, is the results of prolonged dedication to a task, project, goal, or dream. It is most frequently the results of commitment to something larger than yourself, corresponding to a family, a cause, or a community. Fulfillment is essentially lasting and profound happiness.
We inherently know that happiness is fleeting and that success must be our long-term goal. Yet, for most of us, the goal stays the former. As a results of the fallacious focus, countless thousands and thousands find yourself stressed, unhealthy, and suffering from debilitating mental illnesses like depression and addiction.
So how do we break the cycle of chasing short-term satisfaction at the expense of long-term success?
Step 1. Work on yourself
It may sound simplistic, but the basic truth is that success is unimaginable if you don’t first deal with your body and mind. Focusing on your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being is the foundation for any other achievement.
A superb place to start is with food plan and exercise. This doesn’t mean you have to live like an athlete training for the Olympics: small changes can go a great distance to creating big changes, each physically and mentally.
When it comes to food plan, I really like this simple sentence from Michael Pollen’s book: The Omnivore’s Dilemma“Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plant-based.” In other words, don’t overdo it with heavily processed or fast food, in addition to meat, and as a substitute eat a lot of vegetables and fruits. Just following these clear guidelines will do wonders.
When it comes to exercise, every bit counts, and the adage of “use it or lose it” is value remembering. 2013 study It has been found that without regular exercise, we lose 1% to 2% per yr of lean body mass and 1.5% to 5% per yr of overall strength after the age of 40.
If you are not currently exercising, start slowly. Even simple walks have significant advantages. Harvard Report 2023 found that walking just 20 minutes a day, five days a week, has significant health advantages, including cutting obesity rates in half, reducing joint pain, lowering cancer risk, and boosting immunity. Workers who were lively in this basic way took 43% fewer sick days than those that were sedentary.
No matter how busy we are, everyone should find 100 minutes a week to walk.
Step 2. Look outside
To me, the striking similarity among the myriad of self-improvement theories, seminars, and coaching available today is that they have a tendency to focus on looking inward. But finding a purpose that is larger than ourselves is much more vital. Personal change is a part of the process, definitely, but the ultimate goal—the real purpose in life—must be something larger. This form of outward looking will even help with Step 1, because science tells us that interacting with and connecting with others is critical on many levels.
This Polyvagal Theorydeveloped by Dr. Stephen Porges, details that we have a basic human need to connect with others in a meaningful way. It emphasizes the importance of social connections in regulating nervous system responses and promoting emotional well-being.
Likewise, the US Surgeon General he stated in 2023, loneliness – a phenomenon that has turn into much more widespread due to each the pandemic and the isolation resulting from living in a digital world – poses a health risk as deadly as smoking, and its effects might be compared to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
But what constitutes a feel-good connection? In practice, it will possibly be as simple as grabbing coffee with an older neighbor, or coaching a youth sports team, joining a book club, or volunteering at a community center. These are simple, tangible activities that put you in the company of real people—way more spiritually fulfilling than social media or Zoom calls.
Step 3. Redefine what success means
A typical Western construct is that happiness comes from success. The problem is that I think our definition of success is flawed. We tend to equate it with wealth, fame, and power. We’re also conditioned to think that more is higher: extra money, more possessions, and more attention, but I’ve seen firsthand that some of the richest and most “successful” people are among the least completed. They’ve met all the criteria for conventional notions of accomplishment, but something still feels lacking.
AND 2018 study found that as many as 49% of CEOs admit to struggling with mental health issues (compared to just below 23% of the overall U.S. adult population), and most of them say they feel overworked and struggle with fatigue and constant stress.
Chasing short-term happiness in the form of cash, material goods, and social media status creates a vicious cycle of not having every thing, which leads to more stress and unhappiness. Instead, look inward to improve yourself physically and emotionally so that you simply have the ability to look outward. You will turn into a higher leader, friend, coach, and parent—and create a self-perpetuating cycle of improvement.