“Don’t seek validation. Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.  Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.  Real success, real mastery, real sanity that comes only by tying it to your own actions,” Marcus Aurelius.  The real measure of success is knowing that we are doing better than we did yesterday.  As we’ve been talking about, competition and comparison serve no real purpose beyond creating an imagined hierarchy.  Let’s be clear: at the end of our lives, we all end up in the same position—a body that will decay and fade away.  No matter what we have done in life, we all turn to dust and that is the great equalizer of this Earth.  Logically, that means there is no truth to the separation we create between us, there is no better or worse, there is no real power play.  We all need guidance from each other every now and then but that doesn’t make anyone different than us—we are all human and we all have something to bring to the table.  When we need someone to affirm our worth, we’ve lost sight of our role.  I think it’s fine to be ambitious and it’s fine to know our contribution to this world but playing the game of finding worth from outside sources and showing the world is a slippery slope to losing sight of our purpose.

Life is meaningful on its own.  We are here through an alchemical mixture of timing, genetics, creativity, destruction, hope, emptiness, wholeness, purpose, and endless potential.  There is pure magic in that and the fact that we are here is indication that we don’t need to achieve some arbitrary mark to prove our worth.  We don’t need to acquire a certain amount of things to show our value.  Expressing and contributing our gifts IS our value and we find worth in ourselves through learning to master those skills well.  Our safety and well-being can never be granted from someone else because we tie ourselves to their values and ideas rather than our own and our path becomes determined by someone else.  Do what feels right and learn to navigate the world through that feeling, an ever present connectedness that guides us to the next step.