This archive report was first published on 4 August 2019.
On a Sunday evening in August 2019, Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara posed a thought-provoking question: Is success having all of your material needs met and a family that hates you?
She argued that money is not everything and that success may be developing an angel's heart and winning over your people who would die for you anytime anywhere, even if it means struggling financially.
According to Ruligirwa-Kamara, there is no single person, thing, or place that can define success on its own. No one person can universally define success, which means that no one can say for sure what it takes to succeed.
However, this is not necessarily bad news. If no one really knows what success is, we have no business spending valuable time and many sleepless nights worrying about achieving or not achieving it.
As motivational speaker Bob Proctor once said, 'Success is the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal.'
This means that success is not an event, but a continuous experience. It is not something we chase after, but an experience that we endeavour to live up to.
Unfortunately, we often spend our lives regurgitating people's definitions of success, trying to achieve by others' methods. However, our ideals are not necessarily the same as others, and it's essential to develop our own tools and ideals to achieve success.
By understanding and articulating our own ideals, we can evaluate and audit our everyday experiences against them. From there, we can take one course of action: eliminating the negative variances between experiences and our ideals by establishing a modus operandi based on the realisation of our ideals.
The material wins that we are likely to enjoy are simply by-products of living our ideals.
