It's Not About Your Success, It's About Adding Value

 Be of service and add value to everyone around you. It doesn't require that you be a leader to serve, but leaders are better for learning how first to serve. Help a co-worker that is struggling to meet a deadline or that is overwhelmed with a major project. Help your children with their homework or in their development of a new skill like sports or music. Help your friends by lending an empathetic ear. Be company to a senior or someone else who may be lonely and crave companionship. Volunteer at a children's hospital and help patients feel better and less afraid. Help your neighbors. Sometimes adding value to someone can be as simple as a smile or a hug at that moment it is most needed. The peace and rewards of living a life in a spirit of service and adding value to others is far greater compensation than will ever be earned by an occupation. “In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.” ~ Flora Edwards.  “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” ~ Ralph Waldo  Emerson What greater legacy could you leave than to be known as someone who was always there for those around them? And, all the while you're living your life of service, the effects of it continue to grow. “The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.” ~ Frederick Buechner Let your life be defined by the service you render. Your service and the value you add to others becomes your success and you will find you have no need to "pursue" it in all the elusive ways it gets defined. Zig Ziglar said it this way: "You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." “To do more for the world than the world does for you - that is success.” ~ Henry Ford I would like to close today with this Chinese Proverb:  “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”