Success

There are three areas that we mold over the course of our lives: ego, earning, and union. Ego is the idea or image of self, earning is your means to support and sustain, and union is either romantic/sexual pursuits or building and maintaining a family.

A glaring word defines the essence in two out of these three areas (earning and union) of my life in my 20s thus far: instability.  I have found just because something seems stable, doesn’t mean that it is.  Something can be consistent yet volatile, thus still rendering it unstable.

Cosmetically the past two years my life was stable.  But was that because it truly was, or because I wanted it to be so badly.  I made some very positive transitional strides: I was in a relationship that maintained the four pillars of a healthy relationship: communication, respect, trust, and compatibility.  Unfortunately again, a healthy relationship isn’t always a successful relationship; there are many factors that go into the success of a relationship.  What is ultimately crucial in achieving success however, is defining it.  If you define it, you can achieve it.  After the failure of a seemingly stable relationship, I urged myself to define what success for me would be in a relationship.  I made a list of 50 things that I was looking for in a man–quite extensive I know.  Yet, when it comes to success in one of the three areas in your life, it is better to be extensive than incomplete.

With earning, my job, I have held the same one for the past two years.  However, I certainly do not feel career actualized–it doesn’t feel right.  I have the same unease that I felt in my recently ended relationship.  I have been contemplating for months now what path I wanted to pursue in my career.  I finally feel like I have locked in on the target of my area of interest: programming.  I even started a class this year and it is undoubtedly where I want my career to go.  I think in the same way that I defined what I want out of a union at this time in my life, I think it’s vitally important that I define success in my career path as well.  I would feel success in my career if (short-term, you can never plan for the long term):

• To learn at least 5 programming/markup languages.  Ideally all of these:
  • C++
  • .NET
  • C#
  • Java
  • PHP
  • SQL
  • HTML
  • CSS
• Start work as a developer on a billable project

Really that’s all I want for right now.  I will finally feel like my career has substance and stability if I can get to that.  I can reassess what I need at that time.  In both areas of my life, relationships and career, I want to feel that I am facing the right direction, so I can build and walk down the right path.