Lost and Finding Joy

“Don’t aim at success–the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” ~ Victor E. Frankl

Have you ever met with success and realized it was the side effect of helping someone else? I can give you a couple of examples in my own life, but there are more. I don’t want to bore you–I just want to explain what I mean by “side effect.”

We put our house up for sale and began looking for a house in a better neighborhood where we could raise our five children. We didn’t succeed at finding anything that felt right for us. We took the house off the market. After some time had gone by, a friend of mine called me on the phone one night. She was tired, but had signed up to take dinner to a lady who’d just recently had a baby. My friend asked me if I would go along with her to help motivate her with this task. I was tired that night as well, but I didn’t mention that to her, because this was out of character for my friend to ask for help like this. I knew she needed the support. I willingly went along with her to pick up dinner and visit the new mom. As we drove into the neighborhood, I fell in love with it. As many times as we had driven through this area, we failed to find this particular neighborhood. It turned out that they were building the next phase of the neighborhood, and the price range was exactly where we wanted to be. We were able to pick out our lot with a lake view, and customize some of the details in the home. We loved the home and raised our children there for the next 9 years.

P.S. The house we lived in sold quickly, because we were throwing a baby shower for this same friend of mine, and someone came to look at it while it was all decorated and cookies were baked in the oven. The husband came and looked at the house later, and said, “I don’t know why my wife loves this house so much, but we’re buying it.”

I’ll tell a second example quickly, though it is not any less amazing. My son called me at the end of a very long day while my husband and I were out running errands. He said that he needed a book for his book report that night. It was urgent to him. I didn’t want to stop anywhere, I was ready to be home. I knew this meant a lot to him, so we decided to stop at the local bookstore to purchase his book. As we walked by a table in the aisle, a purple book grabbed my attention. I picked it up to get an idea of what it was about. It turned out to be “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. That book was the beginning of a complete transformation of mine and my husband’s lives. I haven’t seen that book out on any other tables at any other time. I know we found it–or it found us–by surrendering to my son’s needs.

Success and happiness comes “..as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than one-self.” ~ Victor E. Frankl