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The road has been long and weary; the stones have bruised your feet; but the dragons have been conquered—at least for now—and you finally have arrived at your destination. You’re home.
What now?
Now you can take time to enjoy the success you have earned. Look around; see what you’ve done. See what others have helped you do. See how you’ve been blessed. Take time, in short, to be thankful. Take time to be grateful.
Also take time to use your success not just for yourself, but for others. This applies whether we’re talking about money and influence, or patience, wisdom, and love. Enrich the soil of your homeland by every means available. Invest in the future.
And while you are home, take the time to ask yourself some hard questions. Do you have regrets? Have you compromised in ways you should not have? In what ways did you make yourself proud? Is your success the sort that endures?
Finally, while you are home, consider where you would like to go next, for unless you have reached the end of life’s journey, you will soon set out on another adventure.
Why? Because, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, you are the sort who says, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”
You are a striver, an achiever. You are determined to make the most of every minute of your life, of every talent you’ve been given, of every skill you have achieved.
You will soon set forth again.
Don’t set out without a plan. Return once more—and again and again, at the end of each journey—to that fundamental question: Who are you, and who would you like to become?
The End Game
Jeff Sandefer
So what is the end goal? Why am I here?
In my twenties, the end goal was all about worldly success. Sure, I thought about politics or saving the world, but they were far-off goals, reserved for after I had earned plenty of money. Later I came to realize that my longing for material success was more about becoming the master of my own destiny. Both goals would prove to be poor masters.
Don’t get me wrong, having money, while it comes with its own set of problems, is far better than being poor. And there’s nothing more freeing than making more money than you spend, so that your time belongs to you. But in chasing the dream of being able to wholly control my destiny, I was chasing a mirage. Such control is impossible.
I admire those with enough inborn wisdom to be comfortable with this fact. I had to climb the peaks of money and power to learn this lesson and find more meaningful challenges to overcome.
The fact that I learned this in and through my entrepreneurial ventures is part of why I have little patience with pundits who trivialize the aspirations of the entrepreneur. We each have our own road to travel, stones to plow through, and dragons to fight, and that’s as it should be.
What I have found is that the end of each hero’s journey gives you the right to play on another level—stronger, more tested, with more finely honed talents, instincts, and a more powerful and trusted network of fellow travelers. In other words, each successful journey gives you the chance to make an even bigger impact.
But in the end, it’s not about that.
It’s about becoming who you were meant to be, in service to the others, and for me, ultimately submitting to my God and Savior. This process of personal growth that comes through the blood, sweat, and courage of journeying heroically, a process at the heart of all the great quest stories, is in the end what gives the hero’s journey its power, permanence, and beauty.
Success
Rev. Robert Sirico
So now you’re home. You’re finished with one enterprise, and you haven’t yet begun on the next. Look around you. What have you achieved?
It might surprise some people to learn that even the Bible—with its ragged prophets living in the wilderness, its wayfaring pilgrims in the desert, its martyrs and saints—doesn’t condemn professional success or wealth creation. In fact, the Parable of the Talents (which you read in chapter 2) praises those who used money to make more money.
The danger with money and success—according to both the Bible and many other religious and philosophical teachings—is that they can become all-consuming.
They can keep us from loving our families as we ought; can tempt us to violate our ethics and damage our integrity; can hinder us from living a full spiritual life. If we come to love success and material wealth more than we love anything else—family, God, integrity—then wealth has become our master rather than our servant, an idol that we bow down to. It has conquered us.
To keep any potential fame or fortune from becoming our master, we must reflect on other forms of success. What would it mean to be a successful mentor and inspiration to those you lead? What would it mean to be a successful employee? A successful parent? A successful spouse? A successful philanthropist?
Many of these definitions will involve descriptions not of what you gain, but of what you become. Have you become someone who is trustworthy in every situation? Have you become someone who can stay calm in a crisis? Have you become someone who can endure? Have you used your God-given talents to the best of your ability?
These character virtues will help you cope with material success in a positive way; but more than that, they are, ultimately, far more important than any material success. As we all know, “You can’t take it with you” when it comes to money, cars, houses, or land. And yet those of us who are convinced that life does not end with the grave also believe that there is something you can take home with you: everything good you have become.
Christians sometimes say it like this: “One short life; it will soon be past. Only things done for Christ will last.”
Your final, eternal homecoming must not be ignored, as you make your calculations and your plans. Live in such a way—journey in such a way—that, when your life on this earth is ended, you will be greeted in the heavenly realms with those blessed words, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
As you rest and look back on your endeavors, consider what forms of success, besides material wealth, you have achieved.
High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922–1941)
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air …
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Note: John Gillespie Magee was a pilot who wrote this poem shortly before he died (age 19) in a mid-air collision. The first and last lines of his poem are engraved on his tombstone.
The deepest measure of your success will be this: in what ways did you bless the world you left behind?
And Yet Fools Say
George Sanford Holmes (1883–1955)
He captured light and caged it in a glass,
Then harnessed it forever to a wire;
He gave men robots with no backs to tire
In bearing burdens for the toiling mass.
He freed the tongue in wood and wax and brass,
Imbued dull images with motion’s fire,
Transmuted metal into human choir
These man-made miracles he brought to pass.
Bulbs banish night along the Great White Way,
Thin threads of copper throb with might unseen;
On silver curtains shadow-actors play
That walk and talk from magic-mouthed machine,
While continents converse through skies o’erhead
And yet fools say that Edison is dead!
What sort of person can work hard, not merely to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but to plant fruit for other people to enjoy? Are you that sort of person?
The Bridge Builder
Will Allen Dromgoole (1860–1934)
An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim, near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
Whether we journey or rest at home, we can be calm and confident if we know who we are and whom we serve.
Crossing the Bar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
A Farewell
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875)
My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and gray;
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.
Ask This
What would you like to see written on your tombstone? That isn’t a morbid question, but one intended to help you focus on the things in life that have enduring value.
What character attributes would you like to have by the time you reach your goals?
What positive character attributes might success itself enhance?
What positive character attributes might success undermine if you aren’t vigilant?
Try This
Imagine that yesterday your every dream came true, every ambition was fulfilled. If this were the case, how would your life be different than it is now? How would you be different?
And what would you choose to do today?