To illustrate what I mean by my mission of, Building success one stone at a time, I’d like you to look at the picture in Figure 1. If you were to break this pyramid down, each side represents a different area of your life while the center stack of blocks represents your overall level of success. Each block in the pyramid represents a particular accomplishment that leads to your overall success.
For my illustration, the red row of blocks represents your career, education, or other aspirations depending on your current stage in life. The blue represents your relationships with family and friends, Yellow represents your personal growth (education, skills, and abilities), and cyan represents your spiritual growth. The blocks in the middle represent the focus of the personal or spiritual growth in relation to the red or blue blocks. For example, some of your personal growth may be learning a new skill. This would help the career growth. While a different personal growth accomplishment may be learning how to be a better parent, which would add to the relationship side.
Figure 1 Ideal Pyramid
So let’s just pretend you have a career and a family. Ideally, you would want to create a good balance between your work life and your family life. This balance would create the pyramid that you see in Figure 1. Unfortunately, many people focus way too much time on their careers that they sometimes forget the other aspects of their lives. So their pyramid looks something like in Figure 2 ”unbalanced. People can usually get away with a little unbalance, but what happens if that trend continues. The success column may look like it is getting bigger and bigger, but like any tower, the taller it gets the more unstable it be
comes.
Your family life is getting less attention so its blocks are not growing, and possibly even deteriorating. You may have spent time in the past developing yourself to get to your level of career success, but now you are just relying on what you already know, and are not taking the time to learn more, so that area of your life is stagnant as well.
So eventually, your career wall becomes very large, but it is left unsupported. When that happens, you put yourself at high risk for a major failure. What happens when you become very sick, or get laid off, or somehow become unable to work. Would you still have your family there to support you? Would you have the skills to potentially switch career paths or go another direction?
Without a balanced pyramid, your overall success is very weak. In a balanced pyramid, even if a few of your career blocks got knocked down, your overall success would not change much because you still have the support of your family, and your education to fall back on.
Figure 2 Unbalanced Pyramid
Up till now, I have not really talked about the spiritual side of things. Many people in this world try to build their pyramid without the 4th side. Although this seems to work for many, it still leaves that side of your success column vulnerable to failure and attack. The way you measure your spiritual success depends on your answer to these questions. What motivates you in life? or What is your purpose?
If you have an answer to these questions, all the other aspects of your life should be working to fulfill that motivation or purpose. This side of the pyramid provides the meaning of your existence. Whether you believe in God or not, if you can at least define a purpose of being here, you are much more likely to be successful in life than someone who has no purpose.
As a Christian, I put my purpose in serving God. Other religions would likely do the same. With that view, even if I occasionally fail in another aspect of my life, my overall success is still being supported by God and I know He will help me rebuild if need be.
So when I say I am building success one stone at a time. I mean it. I am working on building a balanced pyramid for my life and I would like to encourage others to do the same. If I ever have the opportunity to run my own company, I want them to have a balanced pyramid as well. I will work to promote a proper work /life balance, and strongly encourage the continual personal development of each individual that works for me.
This has become my mission and I hope to hold true to it. Thank you for reading.