I’ve had the privilege of going through Viktor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” lately.
Here’s one quote, worth reading twice, on success and happiness:
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you’re 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 ones personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success, you have to let it happen by not caring about it…. In the long run… success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
“Pleasure is, and must remain a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. Hence the failure of hedonism”.
Dr Lachlan Soper