When it comes to managing our personal lives or projects, it is always interesting to put our initiatives into perspective and never lose sight of the reasons why we started them in the first place.
In all the literature on the topic of personal life management, irrespective of it coming from books or from the Internet, all authors seem to be to some extent OCD with one single word :

Success.

« What do successful people do in the morning ? », « 10 things that successful people never do », « The financial habits of successful people », « 5 things to reply in the office to have a successful career »

Success… Blablabla… Success… Blablabla…

Now let me tell you what I think about success and successful people : I absolutely don’t give a sh*** about them. On the contrary, I believe that considering life achievements from the sole perspective of success is already a failure in itself, and does not deserve any respect or consideration.

I don’t believe that millionnaires and billionnaires living a completely depraved life, slave for their money and their insane (and often unsustainable) living standards should be considered as role models whatsoever within our societies. The opposite should actually prevail – their way to be and to do things should be avoided at any cost as the obsession of success is nothing but deeply pathological. Also, in most cases, those that we usually consider as being « successful » owe their fortune more to favourable circumstances, such as inheritance, a network, a degree etc. than to their hard work and intelligence only.

It’s time now turn towards the people who are the truly successful people in the society, those that we actually value most on this blog : people who find happiness in just living the way they want to live, doing what they enjoy to do, with the people they love. Those are the people I have an infinite respect for, as I believe this is exactly how I would define a fulfilling existence.

One could argue that in both cases, people are trying to achieve the top of what they do, try to be the best, and that it is in the end no different. But I fully disagree with such argument because there is a fundamental difference between both categories of people : The former look for the success of themselves, whereas for the latter the success of their project is more important that their own, because the project itself is what makes them happy. Sane ambition can only be built on the feeling of self-fulfilment, not the other way around.

My life has taken a turning point a few weeks ago when I started this blog. The reason for that is that I am genuinely interested in the various ways of working, how to make the best of my time and try to achieve more while keeping things simple. And contributing to this blog is a project that I really enjoy. And those are sufficiently solid foundations to build the blog’s success on. 

My own success doesn’t matter, I am very happy in pyjamas and slippers.