Your Life Is Your Work in that you work on your own life in order to find happiness AND success. Not the other way around, no vice versa. People have already tried the other way. Very few found happiness.

Maybe because they were more worried about success. It seems these days that you can only have one or the other. We might be judged as greedy if we have both. And besides, if we’re successful AND happy, then what will we talk about with our friends?

You can work ridiculously hard all your life and make a TON of money. But you probably won’t be happy. Or you can do no work at all, but you probably won’t be too successful. Even people like Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek and its associated spinoffs work really hard…in four hours. Of course, it all depends on how you uniquely define success and happiness. And that one statement right there might be your first problem.

I was in a communications class once when the instructor asked us to complete a simple exercise. All we had to do was talk to the person next to us for one minute – 60 seconds – about what we are passionate about. There was one man in the room that raised his hand and asked how do you know what you’re passionate about? He really had no idea, and my heart sunk for him.

When we accept someone else’s definition of success or happiness and don’t take the time to define it on our own terms, we’re dooming ourselves for a life full of seeking, unhappiness and little success. When you are unclear about what makes you happy and what success means to you, you’ll never go anywhere; instead, you’ll feel lost, uncertain and never satisfied. And believe me, those are the worst, depressive feelings in the world.

And please, please don’t ever work really hard at something you hate. These people are REALLY unhappy. But they tend to make a lot of money and support a family and live a lavish lifestyle to make up for all the unhappiness bred at work, which means they are tied to the job that will make them X amount of money despite their evident dissatisfaction. They try to self-medicate by complaining. And sometimes drinking. Partying is often involved. Depression is a good possibility. Life starts to fall apart. Nothing good can come of this.

Some will say the sweet spot is working hard at something you love so that you are successful and happy. I say work really hard finding what makes you happy and defining success on your own terms while at the same time exercising your passions in a meaningful way. It’s a subtle change to the statement, but it’s important because it takes away the cause and effect model and blends everything together in one big mish mash pot of soup. When you don’t have to worry about working to find happiness and success, you become free to do work that fulfills you and makes you happy and successful. Funny how that works. Unfortunately, they don’t teach us how to make happy mish mash soup in school.

Fear dictates the whole work-hard-so-I-can-be-happy-and-successful cycle. So many people are afraid to buck the trends, to play outside the norms, to disrupt the status quo, to try something new, to experiment and fail.

Here’s a different way of putting it: failure is to success as black is to white. It’s one or the other people. No in between. At least, that’s what society would like us to think. Scratch that, society already had his hey day at making us believe that. It worked. And now it doesn’t.

The Chinese yin yang symbol, a global icon of peace, is also a good visual representation of the definition of balance. But the yin yang symbol defines balance a bit differently. There is always a little black in the white and a little white in the black. The two flow into and out of the other. It’s not equal, half and half, or even. If you apply the same principle to the binary pair success/failure then there is always failure in success and success in failure. It’s not a one or the other game. It’s an all in kind of match. For your happiness, success and passion project/life’s work.

The people who tell you you can’t have it all are stuck in the cycle of fear. They’re afraid either because they think they already do have it all, at least the way society sees it, but they’re not fulfilled OR they are doing everything in their power to do what it takes to have it all, but they’re still playing someone else’s (society’s) game. The ones who know better created their own game.

Who’s game are you playing?