8 posts tagged “success”

What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

"If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world." and "The gibbon's 'very low sex drive' is a reminder...[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction."
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let's examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived "off the land." Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn't afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn't have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn't afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it's clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits--they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away--the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that's a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don't know what to teach because most of us don't even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don't know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don't fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is "not the person I married." It's usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can't be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don't know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it's that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn't teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting "families" would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn't care much for the word monogamy. It likes "pair-bonding." You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese--most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let's switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is "unfaithful" (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it's up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn't need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn't work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn't have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don't feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don't want the "needy" partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels "cheated on" who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few "unfaithful" partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can't get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says "You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can't be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life" (even though she can't give what the husband needs sexually)--reverse the gender words if it applies--can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don't know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don't know what you're doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That's hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn't get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can't see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life--including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives--we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the "bum" may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That's a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let's consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It's not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won't get involved with someone our friends or family can't stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The "deeply in love" stage is limited in most long term relationships. It's known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it's time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I'm reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn't meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it's because we can't afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it's hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
- Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction novelist (1917-2008)

It wasn't possible for humans to fly, with or without wings. Perhaps the greatest genius of all time--certainly the greatest polymath of all time--Leonardo da Vinci designed a few flying machines, but none proved workable. Now people can "walk" in space, move through air with jet-power packs strapped to their backs, and even travel in airplanes, snoozing and dining at their leisure.

It wasn't possible to see past that glass ceiling known to astronomers from ancient times as the visible heavens. Now telescopes allow astronomers to see light that began its travel up to 13 billion years ago, in places we can't even imagine.

It wasn't possible to speak with someone who was not within shouting distance from you, unless you used a drum whose beat could be heard a little farther away. Now I can use my cell phone from a seat in my boat to speak by phone with someone who lives on the opposite side of our planet. People in desert communities speak with others in desert communities or on mountain tops by satellite phone.

What's possible? Does it indeed have any value to claim that something is impossible?

Judging by what has developed out of impossibilities of the past into possibilities of today, we would not be on certain ground to state categorically that anything is impossible. The question should not be "What is possible?" or "What is impossible?" but "What do we want to do and how can we do it?" Asking the question "How can we do it?" opens the gateway to previously unimagined possibilities.

What purpose is served by claiming that something is impossible? Believe it or not, it has some value. It serves as motivation for those with vision beyond the immediate to show that the "impossible" really is possible. I used to be functionally illiterate, going back about 20 years. This article will be read by people on six continents today. As a middle-aged adult, I learned to read and write. Some say that's impossible, or nearly so.

Don't rule out anything.

Can anyone prove that God exists? Likely not. Can anyone experience God? Definitely. But the people who have experienced God have little real interest in proving what they have experienced to doubters and naysayers. God doesn't proselytize. Neither do those who know him.

Are there bigger questions than that?

Possibly.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to have the best possible advantages in life as they approach adulthood. And for people who want to know what they missed in childhood so they can experience it as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live life.
- Greg Anderson

I can't tell you more about the author of this quote than his name. The quote is so popular that most citations on Google's lists didn't even provide that much. The Greg Andersons Google did turn up seemed to have darker sides than I would prefer.

The quote itself could be dissected with surgical precision. It begins with the idea of motivation. Motivation is a positive or proactive action in this case. Most people seem to react to life, not to treat it proactively. That is, they do what needs to be done because it needs to be done, not because they are motivated by some strong feelings to do it.

The quote says that goals should be the motivating factor, not simply a reaction to surroundings or events. Specifically, goals that have deep meaning. What's that?

A goal with deep meaning would be one that requires much effort to accomplish and that would provide considerable satisfaction on achieving it. It would also be one that would enhance our edification as an individual. Saving a life or making a difference in someone else's life might be such a goal. Getting a university degree. Raising a child successfully.

"Dreams that need completion" is a re-expression of the previous phrase. Dreams, by themselves, go nowhere. They are nothing more than hopes, only with less chance of coming to pass than most hopes. Dreaming of world peace would be one like that.

World peace does not, could not, be achieved without many intervening steps, smaller and more manageable things that could be accomplished. Each of those would have a recognizable end point which, when reached, a person could say it has been accomplished.

Dreams can be goals, but only if they are carved into smaller and more manageable portions, each of which can be accomplished with a plan and considerable effort. World peace will never happen by itself, even if a million people decided to pray about it, all together. Somebody actually has to do something, something concrete and quantifiable, something that can be seen to have been accomplished when the job is done.

"Pure love that needs expressing" may seem simple, but it could be confused by someone who takes it out of context. Love, in this case, is not sex or romantic love, or even motherly love. This love that needs expressing is about the goals with deep meaning. It's a matter of being devoted to accomplishing each stage of the development and eventually achieving the goal with deep meaning. It means loving what you're doing.

That is how to truly live life.

Doesn't everyone do that? Actually, very few people do.

Most of us have life goals as young adults. Whether we accomplish them or not could depend on whether they had manageable steps, whether we had the resources of time and money to accomplish them, but most of all whether we devoted ourselves to reaching those goals. Most life goals get lost along the way, according to the people I have asked about their own.

Perspiration is the fuel by which goals are accomplished, not inspiration. Most people find they don't want to put that much effort into accomplishing their long term goals. So they satisfy themselves that they just "got too busy."

Is it necessary to live life at that level? I mean, it's really hard work, isn't it?

Spend some time in a crowded place, such as a market or a fair, and observe how similar people behave to worker bees in a hive. Worker bees are extremely important to a beehive. And basic workers are important to a society. But, once gone, they are forgotten and quickly replaced with others of their kind. Dead workers are forgotten quickly.

It isn't necessary to live life at the level of accomplishing meaningful goals. Worker bees don't regret their contributions to the welfare of the hive. But not one of them accomplishes a goal with meaning because they spend their lives doing little tasks that need to be done.

I submit that if you look at people who truly live life at the level of meaningful goal accomplishment recommended in the quote, you will find people who feel the same way about life as those who firmly believe that God lives within them.

And that's pretty good.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to teach their children the important lessons of life. Many of those lessons are provided in the book.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now.
- Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar, American author, motivational speaker (b. 1926)

While I am not fond of absolute pronouncements (they leave no room for exceptions), Mr. Ziglar's statement contains a great deal of truth.

Why do we trade long term goals for short term pleasures or desires?

This happens more today than ever before in history, likely because people have more opportunities to gratify themselves now rather than struggle to achieve long term goals that may or may not pan out later.

People accept jobs that have them working 75 to 90 hours per week, carry around laptops and cell phones, even grouse when they must turn their phones off while in a theatre, all to accumulate a high income they don't have time to spend effectively. They may lose their families and spend their income on stuff they would not need if they didn't work all the time. Their pleasure comes from buying, not from doing.

People take drugs for a few minutes of bliss, then forget from one time to the next the horrifying experience of regaining their undrugged senses after the fact. Their marriages, their families and their friendships eventually disintegrate, but they need that hit of pleasure for a few minutes no matter what the cost later.

People marry the wrong partners because they believe it will help them in years to come. They get the looks and recognition for a short time, but live years of misery later when it doesn't work out.

People buy products they see advertised--such as cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, fashion design clothing or upscale cars--despite the fact that these rarely achieve their intended purpose (real enjoyment) and often leave the buyer cash-poor, unable to engage in other worthwhile activities because they don't have enough money left. They don't "get it" that a $100,000 a year income is the same as a $20,000 a year income if both spend it all and have nothing left to show for it.

Why? The answer, I believe, is that we no longer encourage children to have long term goals for their lives as adults. Rather than urging them to determine what they want to make of their lives, what they want to accomplish with their time on this planet, our culture teaches them to buy for pleasure and recognition and work as hard as you must to get the necessary income (as high as possible) to do it.

In my personal life, I didn't have much in the way of goals as a young man. With my intellectual and physical impairments, social backwardness and emotional late development, I thought I would be lucky just to survive long enough to retire from something.

However, I did have one long term goal. One summer day when I was about 16 years old and working for the summer in a factory, a overheard one worker tell another "I never have conversations with people younger than 25 because they don't know anything." A quick self-examination persuaded me that I fit that, I didn't know anything, not much about any subject, no skills at any trade, no aspirations to get them, no hope.

I decided on the spot that one day I would like to know enough that I could speak with knowledge and confidence on some subject. As I had no idea which subject to choose, I decided that I had better gain a bit of knowledge on as many subjects as possible before I selected one to specialize in.

In the process of devouring information on a wide variety of topics over many years, I managed to neglect deciding which subject would be my specialty. Coincidentally, I became a teacher because teaching held more security for a man with a young family than the media work I had been in. That was an accomplishment in itself, since I was functionally illiterate at the time.

As getting an undergraduate degree, then a master's degree from a university brought in more money for a teacher in my region, I secured those as well. Still functionally illiterate. I became skilled at thinking through a subject for a paper, then searching out quotes in books I had not read to support my theses. (It was easy as I only had to read the quotes the authors of the books had quoted, not the whole of the books. Then I requoted the quotes and gave attribution to both authors.)

In my mid 40s, I learned to read for content and enjoyment. That improved my ability to accumulate more information and knowledge.

Eventually I became someone people turned to for information and answers. As my university experience specialized in sociology, people come to me for advice on subjects relating to the social sciences. I had reached my goal.

It had taken nearly 50 years from that first motivational prompt, but I had accomplished what few others had, achieved my life goal.

Looking around at people I know, I realize that few of them have life goals. Real goals they work towards. Most of them have more expensive cars than mine, have bigger homes than mine and pay taxes on higher incomes than mine.

But they aren't as happy. They don't understand why. So they go smoke some grass or get drunk and forget about it.

Remember, our job as adults is to teach the generations following us to make the world better, not to screw it up more than we did. Long term goals, life goals, are important.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers and anyone who wants to teach children what they need to know (outside of schoolwork) to make successes of their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now.
- Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar, American author, motivational speaker (b. 1926)

While I am not fond of absolute pronouncements (they leave no room for exceptions), Mr. Ziglar's statement contains a great deal of truth.

Why do we trade long term goals for short term pleasures or desires?

This happens more today than ever before in history, likely because people have more opportunities to gratify themselves now rather than struggle to achieve long term goals that may or may not pan out later.

People accept jobs that have them working 75 to 90 hours per week, carry around laptops and cell phones, even grouse when they must turn their phones off while in a theatre, all to accumulate a high income they don't have time to spend effectively. They may lose their families and spend their income on stuff they would not need if they didn't work all the time. Their pleasure comes from buying, not from doing.

People take drugs for a few minutes of bliss, then forget from one time to the next the horrifying experience of regaining their undrugged senses after the fact. Their marriages, their families and their friendships eventually disintegrate, but they need that hit of pleasure for a few minutes no matter what the cost later.

People marry the wrong partners because they believe it will help them in years to come. They get the looks and recognition for a short time, but live years of misery later when it doesn't work out.

People buy products they see advertised--such as cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, fashion design clothing or upscale cars--despite the fact that these rarely achieve their intended purpose (real enjoyment) and often leave the buyer cash-poor, unable to engage in other worthwhile activities because they don't have enough money left. They don't "get it" that a $100,000 a year income is the same as a $20,000 a year income if both spend it all and have nothing left to show for it.

Why? The answer, I believe, is that we no longer encourage children to have long term goals for their lives as adults. Rather than urging them to determine what they want to make of their lives, what they want to accomplish with their time on this planet, our culture teaches them to buy for pleasure and recognition and work as hard as you must to get the necessary income (as high as possible) to do it.

In my personal life, I didn't have much in the way of goals as a young man. With my intellectual and physical impairments, social backwardness and emotional late development, I thought I would be lucky just to survive long enough to retire from something.

However, I did have one long term goal. One summer day when I was about 16 years old and working for the summer in a factory, a overheard one worker tell another "I never have conversations with people younger than 25 because they don't know anything." A quick self-examination persuaded me that I fit that, I didn't know anything, not much about any subject, no skills at any trade, no aspirations to get them, no hope.

I decided on the spot that one day I would like to know enough that I could speak with knowledge and confidence on some subject. As I had no idea which subject to choose, I decided that I had better gain a bit of knowledge on as many subjects as possible before I selected one to specialize in.

In the process of devouring information on a wide variety of topics over many years, I managed to neglect deciding which subject would be my specialty. Coincidentally, I became a teacher because teaching held more security for a man with a young family than the media work I had been in. That was an accomplishment in itself, since I was functionally illiterate at the time.

As getting an undergraduate degree, then a master's degree from a university brought in more money for a teacher in my region, I secured those as well. Still functionally illiterate. I became skilled at thinking through a subject for a paper, then searching out quotes in books I had not read to support my theses. (It was easy as I only had to read the quotes the authors of the books had quoted, not the whole of the books. Then I requoted the quotes and gave attribution to both authors.)

In my mid 40s, I learned to read for content and enjoyment. That improved my ability to accumulate more information and knowledge.

Eventually I became someone people turned to for information and answers. As my university experience specialized in sociology, people come to me for advice on subjects relating to the social sciences. I had reached my goal.

It had taken nearly 50 years from that first motivational prompt, but I had accomplished what few others had, achieved my life goal.

Looking around at people I know, I realize that few of them have life goals. Real goals they work towards. Most of them have more expensive cars than mine, have bigger homes than mine and pay taxes on higher incomes than mine.

But they aren't as happy. They don't understand why. So they go smoke some grass or get drunk and forget about it.

Remember, our job as adults is to teach the generations following us to make the world better, not to screw it up more than we did. Long term goals, life goals, are important.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers and anyone who wants to teach children what they need to know (outside of schoolwork) to make successes of their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity. Successful men/women act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
- Dupree Jordan, American biologist, educator (1851-1931)

Lack of self confidence, of self assurance, of belief that you are worthy of the admiration of others if they only knew your qualities and talents, your skills and knowledge, shows on your face, in the expression on your face (facial language), in the way you carry your body (body language), in the position in which you place yourself in relation to someone you are speaking with, in the manner in which you speak.

Belief in yourself as lacking success and self worth shows on you as much looking successful and confident does on someone who feels successful and worthy of admiration. Others will treat you accordingly.

Part of the skill of exuding self confidence can be learned, such as what you need to do to give the perception of success and confidence. The other part, perhaps the more important part, is attitude. That's what you believe about yourself.

Despite what some guides to success will tell you, how you dress has little to do with the perception of you by others of success. Bill Gates, of Microsoft, for example, dresses casually--more correctly like a geek--all the time, though few would ever say he lacks confidence. If your footwear doesn't fit with the rest of your attire, that is apt to tell more about you than whether you are dressed formally, casually or in grubbies.

One of the main reasons that people lack confidence in their abilities is that they don't have sufficient knowledge, skills and abilities to feel confident about. That's a simple matter of filling in gaps in your knowledge or skill sets.

In a casual discussion you must know at least enough to keep the conversation going so that you can come across as a good listener. If the discussion is more like a debate, then you must know more than the others involved or your lack of information will be revealed.

Knowledge and skills do not gift themselves to you within your genetic code. You earn them with hard work. Something you learn today may do you no good for another 30 years, but when you can bring it up in a discuss then it shows you to have both a good memory and a deep base of knowledge.

Read, observe, listen and learn. There's no such thing as knowing too much. Where a problem arises is when you know a great deal about one subject but next to nothing about most others. You can't carry a good conversation if you don't have enough knowledge to participation in a broad range of subjects. If you know only one subject well, you may try to dominate conversations about that subject to show yourself well, but that could turn people away too.

Bill Gates began his adult life as a computer geek. But he learned a huge amount about business, about public speaking, about personnel management. Now he's learning about what it's like to be a benefactor as he gives away billions of dollars each year, computers and software to schools, and dollars for research into cures for disease, especially AIDS. He didn't stop learning when he had expertise in one subject area.

Acting with confidence while having little to back it up with may not be wise either. Most of us have met people who seem confident to the max, but you can't get them to do much or to say much of value because they don't have the stuff to fill their self-inflated balloon of confidence.

You don't have to be an expert to be confident in yourself. Most pretty people are confident, yet airheads if you get them into a serious conversation. They are so used to gaining attention for their beauty that they have to keep the conversation light so their basic ignorance of most subjects isn't revealed.

How can you become recognized for your knowledge long before you know a huge amount about a subject? Learn something then talk about it. Watch a documentary, then include information about that subject in a conversation the next day. Read the newspaper daily, then include facts about a story in your water cooler chats. Read a good book, then be prepared to recommend it to others. Cumulatively, these all add to your aura of being a knowledgeable person.

Act confident and successful, but keep your mouth shut when you don't know much. That's when your skill of being a good listener comes to advantage. A good listener will hear something, then ask a question which the speaker will appreciate because it indicates that the listener has been paying attention and thinking about what he or she has heard. And you will learn in the process.

You can act confident and successful when you don't know much about the topic of conversation but you look confident and ask relevant questions so that your participation is recognized and appreciated.

Nobody knows everything. You only have to know enough when it's your turn to speak and to keep quiet when you don't have relevant information at hand. In between you can smile knowingly and nod at the right times.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an incomparable manual for parents and teachers who want to have knowledge about how to respond best at the right times to the developmental stages of children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."
- Alexander Graham Bell, scientist, inventor, innovator (1847-1922)

Best known as inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell was so famous for parlaying his experience in the family hearing-assistance business into a huge telecommunication conglomerate with an appliance that may be the most widespread electronic device on the planet that his native Scotland, his adopted country Canada and his final country of residence the USA all claim him as their own.

As a scientist and inventor, Bell would have been very familiar with doors closing on him, with experiments that failed time after time. Failure didn't deter him because he knew that success would follow if he stayed the course.

We're all familiar with doors closing on us. Many of us will be familiar with looking back to see the doors we should have opened afterwards that we didn't.

What about those doors that Bell said open for us, but that lead nowhere or that we can't make a success of? There is no point in launching ourselves into a new venture that could result in our bankruptcy.

That last word--bankruptcy--or fear of it, keeps many of us from opening new doors.

The problem is not that new doors don't make themselves available to us. The problem is that we have been taught by our social and education systems that "new doors" must lead to financial success. Many people define success in financial terms, not in terms of self fulfillment, happiness, productiveness, raising a thriving family or even achieving in life goals other than financial ones.

Alexander Graham Bell didn't make his fortune by inventing something that everyone wanted. (In fact, he found the telephone a nuisance and wouldn't even have one in his office.) He became rich by searching for a device that hearing impaired people could use. His mission was a charitable one, not a quest for great wealth. The fact that everyone wanted his new device, that it opened up a new age of communications and made him and his successors ever since very rich were side benefits.

If we search for new doors to open when older familiar ones close on us to improve ourselves or to help others in some way, we will find many possible doors to open.

Searching for a door to make us rich is a sure route to failure. If there were such a door, there would be 6.5 billion others of our kind lined up to open it with us.

Success--even of the financial kind--is not about what we can get, but about what we can give, about what we can offer to others that they need and find valuable. Sometimes what we can give is only our time and effort. But those who need what we give will appreciate it very much. Appreciation is a welcome opiate.

If we better ourselves so that we have something more valuable to offer to others, sometimes that turns into financial success as a benefit.

Sometimes giving of ourselves to others makes us feel needed, valuable, someone who has a worthwhile mission in life. Those who are most loved are those who give the most love.

That's a goal that rich people can only dream about. Yet it's one you can achieve yourself.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers about what kids need and how to satisfy needs that most of us don't even realize our kids have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com