Personal Glory Is a Lousy Goal

“Never need praise, approval or sympathy.” -- From "The Code of Honor" by L. Ron Hubbard

If you want to succeed, a tough, but important lesson you must learn is that seeking personal importance interferes with your success.

If your purpose is to be famous, admired or liked, your decisions will be wrong. People will not respect you. You lose money.

If admiration from others is a big source of your happiness, you become addicted to finding more and more admiration. You lose sight of goals that really matter in life.

Like any addiction, needing admiration can dominate your life. For example, you buy a car or house based on other people's likes instead of your own. You marry the wrong person because you think the marriage makes you look good. You choose a career because it makes you popular, not because you love the work.

An Arabian proverb sums up fame in six words: “A dog barks; the caravan passes.” You might make lots of noise and get some attention, but life moves on. Why waste time and effort for a few dog barks?

It feels good to be admired. It feels satisfying to be liked. But to seek personal fame as a goal can ruin your career, your business, your family, your life.

10 Reasons Why Seeking Admiration Is a Bad Idea

1. You depend on others for your happiness or feeling of self-worth.

2. You prevent implementation of good ideas if they are not YOUR ideas. For example, you might ignore brilliant ideas because the ideas come from your spouse or employee or coworker.

3. To maintain personal importance, you refuse to delegate decision-making. Because everyone must then wait for your blessing before they act, you get stressed to pieces.

4. People learn they can control you by praising you or criticizing you.

5. You avoid important duties because they are unpopular. For example, a boss might not correct employees as it is unpopular.

6. Without a regular dose of validation, self-criticism takes over.

7. You hit a production ceiling as you will not share the stage. You worry that a coworker or partner might steal some of your applause.

8. Working for admiration distracts you from working on more valuable objectives.

9. To make the herd like you, you follow the herd and never break into personal success beyond the herd’s success.

10. Achieving personal glory does not mean you can now pay your bills.

Recommendations

Make your decisions based on what is right for your goals, your family, your group.

Choose goals that have nothing to do with personal glory or fame.

Learn to admire yourself while avoiding a need for admiration from others.

Do what is right, not what you will be applauded for.

Evaluate yourself by your own standards of what you should be, not what others want you to be and you will be a bigger success.

Click here to read "The Code of Honor."
 

Feel free to forward, copy or distribute this message as long as you include the copyright information.

Copyright © 2003 TipsForSuccess.org. All rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard. Programmed in the United States.

For information about TipsForSuccess.org, or to subscribe, click here.