Guest Author - Guest Editor

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
- Maya Angelou

You know the feeling: You’ve planned and dreamed and schemed and worked long and hard to reach a goal and now you’re there, you did it! During those moments in our lives we feel all of the good things we expect such as happiness, satisfaction, pride, security, and so on.

But what has struck me mainly about successfully reaching a goal is how I have learned to clearly define that goal not just in terms of strategy, logistic, or reward but rather in terms of how that goal fits in with the rest of my life.

For example, I once decided that there was a job that I just had to get. It paid double what I was making, was easy, had a lighter workload, and the people there were great.

So I hustled and researched the company, tweaked my resume, and slam-dunked the interview with my natural charm, dazzling intelligence, and lovable personality (well, that’s how I choose to remember it) and voila! I got the job.

And it turned out to be everything I thought it would be. The pay was great, the work was easy, and my colleagues were fine people to work with. But I spent over 80-hours a week there! I grew fatigued physically and became tired mentally.

I have a life and I want to live it! My mind would scream every morning at dawn as I raced to the office. I had become a one-note person who did little else besides work. And I came to hate this job. The benefits were not compensating me in a fair way.

To me, time is not money, it’s life, and I wanted my life back.

In spite of all of my hard work in getting the job, I had failed to do the one thing that really counted the most: I had failed to clearly define what success meant to me and what I was willing to do, or not do, to get it.

That wonderful web thing called Wiktionary defines well-rounded as “having a balanced variety of attributes”. Attributes are elements or parts of something, in this case, your life. We need to have variety in our lives in order to replenish and renew ourselves, to stave off boredom, and to neutralize the negativity that comes our way.

Some of us will work at jobs that we hate, and you might find yourself in this group right now. But remember that it’s those other elements, or attributes, in your life that balance out the pain at least a little.

As Maya tells us, you have to like yourself, like what you do, and like how you do it. And spending too much time at a job, whether you hate it or love it, usually takes away from at least one of these ideas, especially the "how you do it" part.

With that in mind, could it be your time for a new, well-rounded life?