Your Best Ally, Your Worst Enemy

I wrote most of this entry but then restarted because really it was just complaining about how mediocre my family is chattering away and how my computer has crashed/reset nine times this morning and it’s only 10.30am.

Anyway…

Your best ally are your family, or are they just maintaining the ‘level’ of the family ‘unit’? By ‘level’, I mean the standard of living that people are used to. Families will often help family members to maintain the lifestyle and traditions that the family is used to. They say things like “don’t get above your station” and “speak to your elders when spoken to”. Both these phrases are about making people conform, preventing them from doing their own thing. Living life by someone else’s rules is like living their life not yours, not living your life creates inner resentment and the negative energy that makes many people prefer the company of friends.

An example: Some relatives visited yesterday and there was the usual talk about jobs. My sister said about many business delegates at the university where she works and they were all pleased that she is doing so well. I said that I have just launched my design company website, either they weren’t genuinely listening or they just didn’t want to know. A friend of mine gets the same response from her family. A new business does not pay immediately, there is no regular payslip, so they dismiss the idea. It’s only when it pays that they want to know and if you become wealthy, why should you then support them? For this reason, lottery winners do not understand the value of money because it has not been earned.

If your family wants you to do your best and achieve all that you (or is it they) can achieve, that’s great, but few achieve anything all that great. Very few people who have achieved significant success listen to the advice of their family. How can a supportive family be your worst enemy? By preventing you from achieving your potential by discouraging following your dreams causing you to look back later on life and wish that you had done more. It may then be too late.

The most successful people in life choose instead to listen to the advice of people who have achieved the dreams they have. Unless you have many hugely sucessful people in your family, or one that you listen to, then listening to family advice helps you achieve no better than the average person in your family. Regardless of who you listen to, it really comes down to whether or not an individual takes action and uses that advice to create a life for themselves better than they have now. Rarely does a job lead to life a signifcantly better than you have now.