13 Crucial Tips For Preventing Success From Ruining Life

2 Understand Money and Happiness

Dr. Thomas Gilovich is a psychology professor at Cornell University who has studied the money and happiness connection for over twenty years. What he has to say is that money allows us to buys things which does give us temporary happiness. It doesn’t last though.

The news things we get are exciting for a little while and then we adapt to them being around. It is in the anticipation or idea of an outcome that is actually more enjoyable to us than the material thing itself.

When we obtain the things we want such as a great relationship, wealth, and health, we are appreciative at first but we eventually adapt. Many of the things we want to experience aren’t as great as we thought they’d be and can even be a disappointment. It’s important to be appreciative of what you have right now. If you don’t, everything else will have little improvement on how you feel about life.

3 Take a Breather

Breathing can help you feel more positively. It relaxes the nervous system so you don’t experience the constant fear that bad things are happening. If you have grown so successful that you can take time off, you should learn to breathe in a yoga or meditation class.

Taking deep belly breaths can really help you to reset the way you feel if you’re feeling depressed or down. You have been focusing on one aspect of your life for quite some time. The path to success comes with a lot of hard work. You know how to master your goals, why not learn to master breathing?

It will help you with your stressful days and your feelings of uncertainty right now. Getting yourself grounded will allow you to keep on moving in your life’s path.

4 Take a Look Within

Taking a look within can be labeled as mindfulness or meditation. This might scare some of you off especially if you’ve been focusing on goal oriented projects for a long time. It’s really as simple as checking your own emotional pulse. Looking inside of you is a powerful way to gauge the way you’re feeling and where that tension is living in your body.

Many times, we are walking around stiff in the shoulders or back. To take a moment and see where you’re holding stress allows you to release it. Often, you’ll have an inkling of what emotion is causing the manifestation of tension in the body too.

By slowing down and listening to the body, you can find out how to best help your mind. Have you used food or work as a means of numbing your lack of satisfaction? This may seem like an abrupt question but it’s really pretty general that people use work as a band aid for their feelings.

You may have never known how to listen before. It isn’t easy to be still and listen to whatever comes up. You have to quiet the mind and tend to the deeper parts of yourself. This is a challenge but the reward is worth it. If you at all feel ‘not good enough’ or that you don’t belong, this exercise if for you.

Perhaps the fulfillment you were always looking for didn’t come from your success. It may just come from making peace with parts of your past. There are a lot of ways you can quiet the mind. Simple breathing exercises for a few minutes a day can help train your intuition to become more heightened. This can help you find out what you really want from life.

5 Visualize Your Desires

Once you’ve done a bit of mindfulness and focused on yourself, you may find it’s a good time to think about what you want in the future. You know that you can do anything as you’ve proven it to yourself. What other dreams are sitting in you that you haven’t yet strived for and achieved. It can be anything from personal spiritual fulfilment to finding love, meaning to life, or money.

This should be fun, not a task that you feel you have to do. You can keep your eyes closed and visualize what you’d like to see in your future. How you’d like your life to feel. Some will create a vision board or have one image on their computer to remind them of what they want.

Being that you already know you’re fully capable, it’s just a matter of finding the additional things you’re passionate about in life. So what more do you want? Think about it and visualize how it would feel if you had what you want.

6 Create the Person You Really Want to Be

Even if you have what you want, you might feel disappointed that you haven’t changed in ways you thought you would. Maybe you were thinking that a lot of money in the bank or a powerful position would give you greater self-esteem. While it does help, there is also internal work that we have to do.

Like there is no end to the things you can accomplish, you should also never stop trying to be the person you hope to be. Life is always going to throw you obstacles, this is what makes you better. Don’t resist the growth opportunities.

You have and never will have learned all there is to know about life. You will never be perfect and you will likely always have a demon to deal with in your own mind. Oprah Winfrey has this to say about self-improvement,

“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.”

Know that whatever you think will manifest to a physical reality. You have to constantly be cautious about the voices in your head that say you can’t. This is daily work. Keep yourself focused on your deep work and the person you want to be. Ask the hard questions but don’t beat yourself up over it.

7 Remember Your Roots

Successful people have a hard time remembering the fundamentals of who they are sometimes. Our egos get in the way and we pull as far away from our old selves as possible. This is usually a syndrome of fame and wealth because we never want to be back in that spot we were in before all the good stuff happened.

The thing is, you leave a lot of the good lessons and memories behind. Other people may have made sacrifices for you to get to where you are. Don’t forget about them. Don’t burn bridges with people that cared about you before you had big success. This will surely leave you feeling very alone later on down the road.

You are really the only thing that you have. It’s important to keep your identity and honor where you came from. Being grateful and practicing humility will allow you to stay humble and likeable. Success doesn’t equal fulfillment if you forget who you really are.

8 Focus on One Thing At a Time

We have been taught that multi-tasking is a great skill to have. Turns out, none of actually have it. Arianna Huffington did a speech that spoke of the dangers of multitasking. She points out that while we believe we’re being efficient, we are really just spinning our tires.

Scientific evidence has proven that we aren’t capable of multitasking. In knowing this, can you see how you’ve spend days being busy with little positive forward motion? Multitasking just makes your head spin and doesn’t allow you to focus on important things.

The internet has a hand to play in this. Science has found that the internet is changing the way our brains function. We are more scattered and think in a more superficial way. When we are always distracted, our attention to important things are shallow. Deep work isn’t done and that affects our psyche and how much we care about the work we do.

Setting up your time and focusing on one task at a time will allow you feel much less stressed and you’ll get more done. Put the phone away and focus on one thing. It may only take 15 minutes to get that thing done because you’re putting all your effort and thought into it.

Deep work is to use your skills to make something that is valuable. This takes thought, time, energy and concentration. While it might be challenging, this is where all the magical things are manifested. Ideas, results, success, and fulfillment. This kind of work can’t be done when you’re focusing on a million things at once.

9 Practice Abundance Strategies

If you have fear welling up and are worried that you don’t have enough or you could lose all you gained, practicing abundance might help you. It’s important to feel abundant or you may manifest loss in your life. If you feel like there’s scarcity, you may not want to help others. You feel like it’s you against the world.

When you feel abundant, you don’t see an end to the big pie you’re eating. When you don’t see an end, you’re willing to share without fear. When you help others, you will get more back. You’ll feel abundant for one. You’ll also develop good relationships, trust, and have a greater confidence in yourself.

Share your knowledge, give to others, and you will never feel afraid that all the good things will run out. Donate money and give free talks whenever you have the opportunity. The feeling you get will change the way you think. When you think in this way, you will never run out.

10 Create Something

Whatever you’re doing now, working towards the next chapter in your life. Like Tony Robbins says though, if you want a garden, you can’t just hope to manifest it with your thoughts. You have to get your hands dirty and nurture the garden every step of the way.

With any of your greatest dreams and desires, you have to do the same.
Regardless of what you know, knowledge is merely the power of potential. If you don’t put it into action, it has no real meaning or use. So what can you create to make your next success a reality?

What is it that you need to learn? Maybe you want to create an app but are determined to do it yourself. You’ll have to educate yourself on how to make apps. How to program. It may take some time and you may experience setbacks but it’s not impossible. Doing something like this daily can create a master in you. At the end, you will have created something meaningful.

11 Connect

Outsourcing is an important part to accomplishing goals. If you really do want to create your own app for example, why not get some help? Whether they develop the app for you or teach you how to, connecting with people interested in your goals too can speed up the process.

Connecting to your truest wants in life will help you connect with people that are like-minded. Having a tribe of people you relate to well is one of the most fulfilling aspects of being human. It’s relatively easy to connect with people who are interested in what you’re interested in.

Feeding off someone and how they are doing things can help you figure out what route you should take. You may learn a lot from them and they may become your mentor.

12 See Things Objectively

Every decision we make causes us to miss out on something else. Choose one things and there are other things you won’t choose as a result. It’s not possible to have it all in life but do you really want it all anyway?

Many of the things you’ll try won’t resonate with you. Why would you wish to cling onto similar things? If you care about your family and they come first, there are things you won’t have time to do. You can’t be a workaholic and you can’t party with your guy friends when you have a spare moment. Sure, maybe a weekend away here and there is a good balance.

Making things a top priority is important. It’s much like the multitasking. You want to be able to focus on one thing at a time. If you try to do everything, you’ll always be sitting at a shallow level in life. This is a non-fulfilling way to live and that’s why you can’t do it all. Defining your life’s objectives will help you to figure out what means the most to you.

13 Honor Your Success

If you’re reading this because you feel as though succeeded in something big, let me ask you a question. Did you really celebrate the success? Did you give yourself the credit you deserve for the hard work and smart moves to get you what you wanted?

If you didn’t, this is a helpful way to boost your mood. Most of us tend to belittle our accomplishments and there is actually good reason for that. As a pack species, we are afraid to shine too big for fear that we may be shunned. Sticking out is not something we naturally want to do.

So you can try to do it in a more indirect way. Nobody has to know. Celebrating your accomplishments might mean buying something you couldn’t before. Going out for dinner with someone you care about. It’s more about those little ways we can take care of ourselves because we deserve it.

Working really hard and not reaping the rewards from it will make you feel terribly unhappy. Spend time with those you care about and relish in the successes you have. Thank yourself and thank the people around you too.

Tim Ferriss isn’t too fussy about money. What matter more to him is the balance in his life and letting go of the money factor. To avoid misery even though you’re successful, it’s important not to become addicted to the wealth or the power you have. If you don’t have those things yet, don’t focus on it.

Focusing on what you want and going for it with every ounce of heart you have is the secret to happiness and fulfillment. The money is likely going to be a bi-product of your passions and grit. Regardless though, you’ll feel a sense of wealth because you’ll be happy. There is no connection of happiness and money that will sustain you for a long time.

Nobody can take away the fulfillment factor. That is your own. That is what you need to find your true bliss. Appreciate what you have at the present moment. If you are miserably successful, your goals were designed to fill a void in your life. It’s far easier to fill the void. This will make it easier to be even more successful and also to really enjoy it.