Are success and happiness compatible, or are they mutually exclusive?
Bishop T. D. Jakes says that success never feels like success. What you dreamed of and what you later achieve feel like two separate things.
I sat at lunch with the president of a large, multimillion-dollar company and asked her what her definition of success is. “Success is happiness,” she answered without a pause. “Money is important,” she said, chewing on an olive from her niçoise salad, “but it has to be looked at in perspective. I tell my sons to work toward doing a good job. If we do the very best we can, someone will notice us. A person doing a good job won’t go unnoticed.”
I listened, waiting for more. She went on. “I thought hitting the top meant to have the world on a string. I come from the hood, and as a kid we were dirt poor, so I always believed having money was the key to happiness. Owning things, not worrying about bills. Ha! I have more bills now than dogs have fleas. I know now that happiness doesn’t have much to do with your position or with money.”
I asked her what kinds of things she worries about, if she ever worries about losing her job. Does she lose sleep over her responsibilities? Does she worry about the company’s competition? “Oh, sure, I worry,” she said with a laugh, “but it doesn’t help me do my job any better. I have to concentrate on what works, not on what doesn’t. Besides, my job and the company aren’t the most important things in my life.
“If I’m a success, it’s because I have found favor in the sight of the Lord and I please Him. Not only in work but also in my home, my family, my community, and my church, I try to make my life calling to please Him.”
A life calling to please the Lord.
“And how does this make you happy?” I asked.
Her voice softened. She leaned toward me and said, “Marie, when I was a young, inexperienced, shy, and scared kid doing a job I wasn’t qualified for at another company, I gave my life to Christ. We all have these big holes in us only God can fill, and He filled the hole in me. I asked Jesus to commandeer my life. He showed me I am no more important to Him where I’m at now than when I was a poor kid living in the hood.”
In the self-discovery survey I conducted, 30 percent of the four hundred respondents reported they were in work situations they didn’t particularly like. Some said they stayed in the job because it paid good money. Others stayed in unhappy job situations because of the economy and a fear of not finding another job, others because they were afraid to lose their retirement, others because of a lack of skills to get a better job, and still others because of a fear of the unknown. The responses were mainly fear based.
Why do we do the work we do? Why do we stay in the work we do? We’re fast becoming an information society, and it’s vital that you and I see where we belong in it. A secret of staying happy is to recognize and accept change and progress around you with the mind and heart of God. What is He saying to you? How is He leading and guiding you? God will always invest in His purposes. If you’re aligned with the purposes of God, you’ll always prevail because God always invests in Himself.
If you believe that God always invests in His purposes, why would you still want to pursue your own purposes?
Right Where You Are and Doing What You Do
Peter made his living as a fisherman. It was his career, his field of expertise, his job. About a week after Jesus was crucified, Peter, still grieving, went fishing, doing what he knew how to do. He took six other men with him and fished all night, but they caught nothing. Sometimes you’ll find that when you’re doing the work you’re called to do, the rewards just aren’t there right away. You catch nothing. You work hard, you fish all night, and you catch nothing. Morning dawns, and not a single fish flaps in your net.
It’s during those discouraging times that you wonder if your calling is real. You’re tempted to wonder if you’re in the right career. Maybe God didn’t call you after all. You’re tempted to downgrade your work, dishonor your work.
Honoring your work and working hard are two different things. You can work hard and hate your job. When you honor your work, you show respect for yourself and for God, who wants to bless and prosper you. Honor yourself and your work. This is soul work (mind, emotions, and will). It takes a decision and effort on your part; it takes your intention.
Out on the water, Peter heard a voice calling from the shore. “Children, have you any food?” (John 21:5). I ask you, what grown man calls grown men “children”? Only a parent! This term of endearment is what a father calls his sons. Some translations have the word lads, boys, or sons. John recognized Jesus first, but only after Jesus told them to cast the net over the right side of the boat—which they did, and the net filled with so many fish they couldn’t even haul it in—did he get the whole picture.
Think what would have happened if Peter had ignored Jesus’s suggestion to cast the net on the other side of the boat and just sat there bemoaning his life. Jesus wants to bless your work. He blessed Peter at his job! Jesus wants to bless you with miracles and more fish (blessings) than you can haul in, but perhaps you’re too wrapped up in trying to bless yourself and work your own miracles.
God wants to show you where to cast your net. He’ll honor you right where you are. As His “boys” made their way to shore, shocked and completely beside themselves, they towed a burgeoning net filled with 153 fish, a huge haul! God wants to bless you in your work, and not in dribbles with little toss-’em-back fish. Jesus shared the bounty by sitting down and having a fish-fry breakfast with the men. In fact, He already had the fire going before they reached Him.
Let go of your fears, your worries, and all of the doubts that harass your soul and mess up your work. Throw your net over on the other side. Throw in your line. Let it go deep. Walk by faith, not by sight. Let go and watch for the miracles. You might have to wait all night through what is called “the dark night of the soul,” so I say do it with gratitude. Don’t waste an opportunity to outdo and outsmart your selfish, complaining self with the power of gratitude. If you’re out in the dark on the lake with no fish, enjoy the night sky. Look up at the stars. Sing. Recite Scripture. Think creatively and praise God. Expect a miracle.
And let go of jealousy. Let go of striving. Let go of competing. Let go of lying. Let go of worrying about the future. Let go of feeling you missed the boat. God has miracles ahead for you.
The Lord honored Peter’s work that day with a miracle of bounty, and He wants to do the same for you. Honor your work right where you are. If you do what it takes to honor and prosper your soul, God will always honor you and your work.
Integrate the following tools into your daily life and know that what you’re doing now is meaningful.
Take a wider view of life around you. See yourself, your family, your community, and your church with a new perspective. See yourself as a part of something much larger than your own small world. Allow your world to expand. In this way, your mind is loosed from the pinched claw of your needs.
Honor your feelings and then let them go. See yourself as whole. See yourself as a person of faith and courage. I’m not suggesting you deny feelings of fear and doubt, but when you feel these things, acknowledge the feelings and then let them go. Your emotions don’t possess you. Honor them and then release them from the truth in your core. The Holy Spirit is in you; He’s your Helper, your Friend, sent from God in the name of Jesus to make all things plain to you (John 14:26).
Embrace the moment. Don’t lose this moment if it isn’t exactly what you want. We lose way too much of our lives by waiting for better things to take place in the future. “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven” (Eccles. 3:1), and the season in this moment is yours not to discount or to elude but to embrace. This very season, this very moment you’re living in right now is yours in all its wonder and in all its difficulty and complexity.
Honor your work right where you are. Prosper your soul and let God prosper your work. Love what God sees in you right where you are.
Dreams
How many of your lifelong dreams and desires can you name? (A desire is different from a goal. A goal has a time limit and an accomplishment factor. If, say, you vow to read ten books by August, that’s a goal. But if you want to start reading more, that’s a desire.) Take out your happiness journal and make the list as lengthy as you can, going back to the dreams you had for your life as a child as well as the most recent ones you had as an adult. Next, rank the dreams in order of their importance to you. What do your dreams say about you? Why have some remained dreams and not become goals before now?
The Inner Need for More
The first sign that something is off-kilter in your life is when your desires are more important than your quest for God. I know what that’s like. I was there. I’ve already shared with you how, as a young person, I lived and breathed my love for ballet and the theater. My dream in life was to dance, and I gave all my energy and heart to a career. I danced my way through high school and performed regularly in USO shows, with local theater companies, with the Midwest Ballet Company, on TV, at trade shows, and in musicals before heading to New York City to study professionally and to work. I squeezed God in where He fit with my dreams. I didn’t really know how far away from Him I was because spiritually I wasn’t very developed. I had given my life to the Lord at a Baptist prayer meeting when I was twelve. I was a Christian, yes, but my work was my religion, and I loved it with a religious passion. God was so merciful to me because He saw what I couldn’t see. He saw how desperately I needed Him, and He made me recognize that need. I, too, had that God-shaped hole in me that only He could fill.
One summer I was visiting my family in Minnesota, and I saw the lives of my Christian aunts and uncles who loved God and seemed to radiate with happy, fulfilled lives. Their lives just looked bright to me, but I was into positive thinking and Zen at the time, nothing to do with Jesus, even though I considered myself a good Christian. My sister took me by the shoulders and said, “Marie, the way to God is through Jesus.” I thought the roof had fallen on my head. I didn’t know what to do; I could hardly move. I managed to wend my way to a quiet place in the house and sit alone in the dark. I sat there in the quiet and the stillness, and then out loud in the dark I said yes—yes to Jesus.
From that moment, my world has never been the same. A giant explosion took place inside me. The Holy Spirit moved into me, and my spirit fused with His. It was shocking, earth-rattling. I knew my life had been split open. I told my uncle the next day I was not going back to New York the same person. Up to that point, I had listened to hundreds of sermons based on being good and living the Golden Rule, but I didn’t know how to be intimate with the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit inside us that prepares us for His working outside us. I returned to New York as a girl in love. I had fallen in love with Jesus.
When we have desires that are self-inspired and world-inspired, they take over the space in us that belongs to God. When a particular desire or career possesses us, God is left out of the equation.
I see people inspired to be something, but God is saying to first just be. The expression just be means, for our purposes, to focus on becoming still and allowing the Lord to define us. One way to do this is to spend time alone with Him simply listening, as you’re doing in Quiet Prayer. It’s not easy to be quiet before God and sit still in His presence without asking anything or saying anything. We want to fill the air with our words. We want to let Him know we’re here.
We put limits on God in many ways. We can get quite comfortable in our complaints until lack and unhappiness become a way of life that we actually begin to cling to in order to function. We need to begin to practice gratitude and decide to stop ordering God around. Begin telling yourself the things God has done for you, the joys you’ve experienced, and the answered prayers you’ve received. Love Him on His terms.
Experience the words of life in Psalm 150: “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD” (v. 6). Since everything that has breath is commanded to praise the Lord, the only scriptural excuse for not praising Him is to be out of breath!
A common misbelief is that hard work always pays off in the end. We need to learn to find rewards within ourselves because in life there are no guarantees. An employer of a small manufacturing company told me that no employee is indispensable because there are always other equally qualified people out there eager for a job in his company. Or how about the person who has thrust their life into a project or business that fails?
We work and we pray and we trust that God will reward us and honor His Word, which tells us, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find” (Matt. 7:7). When an enemy called time sneaks in, we lose heart because we think when we order God around He shouldn’t take His time in answering.
Disappointment at not receiving answers to prayer when and how we want is difficult to avoid. We think we have to somehow encourage God and do something radical to impress upon Him the urgency of our request, but we don’t have to bribe or beg God. He answers freely. We don’t have to earn His favor; we need to stay in His presence, stay intimate with Him, and trust His will and timing, realizing that without Him our own strength and our own abilities are virtually worthless.
The Bible says, “Let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands for us; yes establish the work of our hands” (Ps. 90:17).
One thing is certain as we examine dreams and our pursuits of success. What matters is how you pursue your dreams with what’s inside you. It doesn’t matter how clever, how smart, or how shrewd you are. If your soul is sour and your spirit bereft, you’ll never know the life you were meant to have, and you won’t experience lasting happiness no matter how much you achieve or accrue.
Knowing and Appreciating Your Needs
Early experiments with animals demonstrate the strong effect our needs have. Early researchers in psychological response and adjustment, Drs. George Lehner and Ella Kube, in their work The Dynamics of Personal Adjustment, give an example of an experiment made with an obstruction box with a mouse at one end and a piece of cheese at the other. Between the mouse and the cheese is an electrically charged grid. If the mouse is fed just prior to going into the box, he’ll show only a perfunctory, mild interest in the cheese because he’s not hungry. Later when he’s ravenously hungry, he’ll use all his efforts to get the cheese, even pushing against the electrically charged grid until he succeeds or falls over in exhaustion.1
Needs influence our behavior and every aspect of our lives. It’s important, then, to identify what we consider needs. The psychologically hurting person usually has unrealistic and destructive needs. You may think that you need to be better looking or lose weight in order to be happy. If you believe these are needs, you’ll discover down the line that your devotion to satisfying these needs will leave real needs in your life unsatisfied.
Perhaps a person believes they have a need to make a lot of money. A disproportionate drive to make money can stem from the insecure space in a person who wants to get back at the world, to spit in the eye of past deprivation and set themselves up on a high tower where being poor can’t reach them. On the flip side of the drive to make money can be a genuine God-given desire to bless the Lord and do His work on earth. Money is a good thing. It’s lusting after it, worrying we never have enough, misspending it, abusing what we have, hungrily wanting what others have, and not being grateful or giving that destroy us. We can destroy ourselves having too little as well as having too much when our concentration is fixed on money. God wants us to fix our minds on Him first.
When we lust after the wrong thing because we think we need it, the very thing we thought was so crucial can become meaningless when we get it. We easily become dissatisfied and want more.
Here’s a happiness principle to practice: Discern and recognize your needs. Some needs you have are very basic, and it’s important they be met. We’ll talk about them in a moment. It’s important to remember that needs aren’t wants. Too many patients in mental hospitals and too many patients in the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists are there because of conflicted wants and needs.
There’s a difference between a need and a want. A key to finding out the difference is to locate what you’re telling yourself you can’t live without. A client of mine in his second year of medical school told me in agony that he didn’t think he could live without fulfilling his dream of becoming a doctor one day. He had been an average student in college, and now in medical school he was failing. He wanted me to help him bring up his grades and succeed in school because, he said, he needed to fulfill his dream. The problem was he had no interest in medicine! He was motivated not by a passion for becoming a doctor but by the fear of failing. His need was to avoid losing face. My client had never made the effort to really get to know himself and his real needs. But there’s a happy ending to his story. He’s now a high school gym instructor and soccer coach. He’s one happy guy and doing more good for his students than he’d ever have done as an unhappy, bad physician.
Below is a list of realistic needs and unrealistic wants. You should fulfill needs, and it is realistic for you to pursue their fulfillment. The wants are not needs. You don’t need them!
| Realistic Needs | Unrealistic Wants |
| Security | To have more than others |
| Self-confidence | To be the greatest person alive |
| Friendship | Unquestioning loyalty |
| Respect | Adoration |
| Trust | Power over all situations |
| Love | Dependency |
| Skill | Brilliance, genius, to be the best |
| Thinking and reasoning ability | Dazzling mental abilities |
| Creativity | Masterful achievements |
| Freedom | Pampered pleasure |
| Self-discipline | License to sin |
| To be productive | Using busyness as avoidance behavior |
| To learn and grow | To be smarter and more knowledgeable than others |
| To give back to the world | To be applauded and heralded for your selflessness |
How many of the above unrealistic wants do you recognize in your own life? What realistic needs are important to you? Write down these realistic needs in your happiness journal so you can be aware of them and not deny yourself the privilege of having them met consistently in your life. If these needs aren’t recognized and met, you’ll not only be frustrated but also feel you’re among the disadvantaged and unlucky people in this world. Or you may be pursuing something that’s not for you.
The most important need you have is the need to give back to the world. Happiness will pass you by if you don’t fulfill this need. You were created to give back.
The Poverty Mind-Set
The poverty mind-set is the subtle destructive force that rears its nasty head with complaints and endless worries about money. We complain about what we don’t have, what we ought to have, what we’ve lost, what we’ve ruined. We constantly worry about paying bills. We lose sleep fretting about the financial future, but it doesn’t stop there. We worry about our health and the health of loved ones and about anything else that points to what’s missing or what we don’t have. We’re focused on lack. All of this reflects a poverty mind-set, and it plays havoc on our emotional and physical health, and our spiritual life takes a nosedive because we aren’t operating in faith. Remember that powerful force called faith? It’s believing God’s Word. But instead of choosing to believe in God’s provision with gratitude and assurance, we sink to complaining and worrying, which lead us down the path to depression.
I found this happening in my own life. I wasn’t aware of the impact that complaining and worrying about money had on me and my happiness. I had to face the truth that happiness doesn’t coexist with complaining and worry. I made a serious examination of the words I spoke every day. How often did I say things like, “How will I pay for that?” or “I don’t have . . .” or “I’ll never be able to afford . . .”? I knew in order to be prosperous as 3 John 2 says, to prosper as my soul prospers, I’d have to make some serious attitude changes. I taught myself to stop complaining and began a concentrated, dedicated habit (building new neuro-pathways) of being grateful to and confident in the Lord. And I praised Him for what I did have. I had to put an end to a poverty mind-set that I had blindly allowed.
What a relief! What freedom! I began to fix my mind on Him instead of my needs. Quiet Prayer was a huge help in this area because being alone with the Lord without asking for anything put me in a state of worship and honoring Him for Himself, not for what He’d do for me. Once we get rid of complaining and worrying about money, we make room for real prosperity. Now I’m far more concerned about the condition of my soul and loving God than I am about money.
Value Apart from Work
As a believer in Christ, you belong to God and you’re joined to Him forever. To look for self-worth without God is as hopeless as hunting for orchids in wintry Montana. Jesus is Lord of your needs. Will you accept that reality right now before going any further? Free yourself now. I like this quotation by Mother Teresa: “We must free ourselves to be filled by God.”2
I overheard a teenager telling her friends in the hallway of a church where I was speaking, “To not accept Jesus as my Lord would be sheer craziness.” Don’t be intimidated by the culture or intellect of our age. There’s no need big enough to intimidate God!
When our ideals and standards are unrealistically demanding, we always have the feeling our lives aren’t being lived as well as they could be. We’re prey to the “musts” and “shoulds” and “ought tos” of life.
Achievement is one measure of fulfillment, and to the person with high goals, it becomes a major measure of fulfillment. This is unrealistic. They feel achievement gives them the right to feel fulfilled. The person then sets goals that are over-demanding and require extremely rigorous dedication—something a happy person knows better than to do.
Happiness isn’t an end in itself; it’s a beginning. The happiness I’m talking about in this book is happiness that burns from within. It’s inextinguishable. Happy people don’t fall prey to proving themselves. Happy people have much more to give the world because they have no demands on the world to fulfill their needs. Happy people don’t harbor unmet expectations.
One of the preachers I interviewed told me of his enormous craving to be needed when he was young in the ministry. His need to be needed dominated his life. It took failure and disgrace to cure him, he said. “It used to be I could concentrate on nothing else but building my ministry. I was in love with the idea of being the one with the answers, the one who brought help and healing to people, and having a big church. I was the man. I was the one who needed to be needed.” He said ministry could be summed up in three words: me, me, and me. He didn’t know he orchestrated his own demise by failing to understand that unless God builds the house, it’s built in vain (Ps. 127:1). We can’t play God.
Broken and wounded after being booted out of the church he had worked so hard to build, he began to rebuild himself. At the root of overachieving is the deadly sin of pride. It took over ten years for this pastor to rebuild his life and ministry, which now is helping thousands of people rebuild their lives. He learned from his failure. He learned to focus on God’s work, not his. And now his failure has been turned to good.
The housewife, the minister, the woman back in the workforce, the executive—none of them can be all things to all people. We can’t be all things to ourselves, and we can’t be all things to God. Often the person with high expectations will think of themselves as a person chosen and set apart to accomplish something so special and unique that God could choose only them to do it. This person believes they are a really special person God can’t do without.
Unhappily, such misbeliefs create pressure to achieve and succeed, and unhappiness is their constant companion.
Answer the following questions:
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you’re probably under a lot of daily pressure. It’s time to take a good look at yourself, your goals, and your motives for your work and personal life. It’s time to practice letting go.
It’s not a bad thing to want to do well and succeed. Far from it. But in our zeal to perform our lives well, we can go beyond the limits of God’s leading.
What we do and have aren’t proof of our personal value. Jesus did not die on the cross for you so that you would have to earn your personal value. You are a winner because you simply are. Stress-prone people have very little good to offer the world because their main focus is themselves.
Tell yourself you’re a new person in Christ. All the old things are long gone. Memorize this Scripture passage:
Therefore if any person is [engrafted] in Christ (the Messiah) he is a new creation (a new creature altogether); the old [previous moral and spiritual condition] has passed away. Behold, the fresh and new has come! (2 Cor. 5:17 AMP)
Remind yourself of Psalm 91:1 and your true dwelling place, your holy habitation for withdrawing into God’s presence. It is a covering and the secret place of the Most High. Make the words personal. I’m covered. I dwell in the secret place of the Most High, and I live under the glorious shadow of the Almighty. The Amplified version says, “He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall remain stable and fixed under the shadow of the Almighty [Whose power no foe can withstand].” The Message says, “You who sit down in the High God’s presence, spend the night in Shaddai’s shadow, say this: ‘GOD, you’re my refuge!’”
The Lord knows you need meaningful work. He knows your heart. He wants you to know true and lasting happiness, and so you will.
Now is a good time to enter your five-minute Quiet Prayer before you go on to the next chapter. If you can learn to practice stilling your mind in the quietness of the presence of God as I’m suggesting, you’ll soon be amazed at the difference in your daily life.