The Secret to My Success

The secret to my suc­cess is not being too good at any­thing. If I had fin­ished any of my unfin­ished degrees, I would not be liv­ing here. The pro­fes­sional forks in the road would have taken me other places with more nar­row pos­si­bil­i­ties. Unlike most of the rest of the world, I do not mea­sure suc­cess as being a spe­cial­ist in one thing. That pays more, but it also has some tricky lim­i­ta­tions. Brain sur­geons make a lot more than I do, but they are also very lim­ited by time and the press­ing needs of ail­ing patients. It is very dif­fi­cult for them to vaca­tion or just have time each day to reflect. The same is true for many oth­ers in a vari­ety of fields.
The fif­teen min­utes of fame, so sought after by many, can actu­ally become the mill­stone around their neck that drowns them. I cer­tainly do not begrudge other forms of suc­cess, but I have learned not to envy them either. Some­times there is noth­ing more dis­as­trous than suc­cess. It can inflate the ego and cost the soul all at the same time. The “rush” of the sense of suc­cess can be very blind­ing. Long term out­comes often lose their sig­nif­i­cance in short term exhil­a­ra­tion. Or, as Jesus expressed it, “What good is it if a man gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Suc­cesses and con­se­quences are too often dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories — and eas­ily con­fused.
My life is a trail of bro­ken things along the way — rela­tion­ships I have out­grown (and some that have out­grown me). Some of my most promis­ing jobs were dead ends. It is amaz­ing how the ego and the soul size pos­si­bil­i­ties up dif­fer­ently. One is attached to out­ward signs of suc­cess or just fit­ting in, the other is about jour­ney­ing and mys­tery. The lat­ter have never failed me. The for­mer were doomed from the start.
So, now the secret of my suc­cess is no longer a secret. I got here by not being too good at any sin­gle thing. That is a state­ment of God’s grace and my will­ing­ness to pre­fer the ulti­mate to any tempt­ing imme­di­ate. I have not done this per­fectly just per­sis­tently. Even that has been a grace.