Viktor E. Frankl: Don’t Aim Success

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are 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 one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product 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.

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.* Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

*Emphasized by Hygeia