I profited from participating in the Landmark Education seminar “Producing Breakthrough Results”. For this course, my goal was to convince a group of friend to go bungee jumping. As a direct result of this seminar, I succeeded and that success has changed my life forever.
I talked to many other graduates of that class and all of them were extremely positive and happy about the class. When I asked them if they had accomplished the goal they chose, very few of them achieved the goal, or even got close. It is as though they enjoyed getting pumped up and dreaming about achieving a goal and forgot about the actual achievement.
This is what I call internal versus external success. Internally, this person was successful, because they feel successful, they are happy. Externally, the circumstances of their life did not change and none of the things they professed to want to achieve showed up.
I accept both are important. It is important to be happy with our current circumstances and be enlightened, in addition I think it is just as important to achieve concrete results. Similar to a quote from Steve Jobs “Real artists ship”.
Let’s make our goal to be both internally and externally successful.