The Secrets of True Success

What will they think of me?

I have lived most of my life around men who are affluent and have experienced varying degrees of business success. These last nine years, as director of the Center for Executive Leadership, I have occupied the position of teacher, coach, and counselor to many of them. In the process of doing my job, they have confirmed a truth that I knew deep down to be true—an essential part of the mystique of business success is to present a corporate happy face by projecting an image of strength and competence to the outside world. As a result, many men feel a huge pressure to maintain the image that they are bulletproof, that they can handle any problem, any struggle, at any and all times.

However, I have discovered that in any man’s life, true success cannot be sustained over any extended period of time by denying the existence of internal struggles. Deeply personal issues such as identity, fear, discontentment, and depression are issues all men must deal with at some time in their lives, but generally they are at a loss as to what they should do about them.

Excerpted from The True Measure of a Man: How Perceptions of Success, Achievement & Recognition Fail Men in Difficult Times by Richard E. Simmons III

The struggles in a man's life

Of all the suicides in the United States, 80% are committed by men. This fact reminded me of a conversation I had a number of years ago with a man who was the executive director of a large drug and alcohol recovery center. This particular center worked with both men and women who were struggling with addictions. I had the opportunity to be the speaker several times at their chapel services, and I could not help but notice that for every one woman, there were eight or nine men in the audience. The director indicated that this was the national average. Furthermore, he went on to tell me that in almost all cases, these addictions were clearly symptoms of deeper and more troubling issues in the lives of these men.

When you look out into the marketplace, you see many men coming and going, and to a man they appear to be doing just fine. No problems. Yet under an exterior life of confidence, there exists in almost all men a hidden life of fear, pain, and loneliness. And most of these men have no idea what they should do. Most of them live with great fear that they might one day be exposed.

The person you can become

Remember earlier when we saw how all of us, in some measure or another, get our identity from someone outside of ourselves? To compound the problem we are always on the lookout for ways to please and impress these people because their opinions are what validates us. What would happen if we let the person who determines our worth be God? Recognizing that God is the supreme and ultimate reality who stands behind all of life is crucial for all of us. Scripture is clear about this truth. We are told in Psalm 139:16:

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (author paraphrase).

In Ephesians 2:10 we learn:

We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them (author paraphrase).

Your worth as a person has to do with your value. Your value is not based on what you do but on who made you. God is telling us that He is the One who gave us our existence, our very being. We are here for a reason, for a purpose. God has a plan for our lives—a plan that is full of meaning and purpose.

A new perspective

Many years ago, someone shared with me words from the apostle Paul in the book of Romans (8:28) where God declares that all circumstances in a person’s life are working together for that person’s good. That thought gave me a great deal of encouragement, particularly when I realized that life was full of difficulty. The problem for me was how to interpret the word good.

Sure, I wanted the “good life” and thought that was what God wanted for me. However, I had interpreted the good life to mean achievement, comfort, pleasure, and prosperity.

After it was pointed out to me, I soon realized the importance of looking at the next verse in Romans because verse 29 revealed what was actually good for my life in the sight of God. What I considered to be the good life was not at all what God had revealed it to be. In Romans 8:29 we are told that the ultimate good in life is that we be conformed to the image of His Son. It finally dawned on me that God’s desire for me and for all men is to become more like Jesus. Up until that time, my whole life had been focused on what I was achieving and what I was experiencing. God, on the other hand, was more concerned with the type of man I was becoming.

To be transformed in our character

A man’s character is not static. Certain character qualities in our lives are either increasing or diminishing. Unfortunately, out in the world of business, a general erosion seems to be taking place in men’s character. What we fail to realize is that when image and appearance become preeminent in our lives, the heart and the soul will be neglected. The ways of the commercial world can then easily eat away at our character if we do not stay on guard.

When we think of character, we generally think of honesty, integrity, diligence, fairness, and selflessness. But at the heart of character is the ability to restrain our desires. As a man grows in character, he builds the muscles of self-restraint.

A life of contentment

Without exception, men have the capacity to scope out the future in their imaginations before it ever arrives. We are always questioning, What if? Envisioning the future can help us plan, can give us targets to shoot for, and can offer us realistic hope for a better tomorrow. Isn’t it just as true that we are also at risk of spending too much of our time imagining a brighter future rather than living well in the present? As we play out the future in our imaginations, we often inadvertently throw our lives out of sync with present reality.
As we have seen, the most obvious consequence in imagining the future is that it so easily leads to fear. Fear, worry, and anxiety all result from uncertainty. In the face of change and transition, we may start to worry about the unfolding of events yet to be realized, and this leads to a fear that can paralyze us as it starts to run wild in our imaginations. But most significantly, such fear can keep us from living a really good, joyful life in the present.

Planning to be happy

Another aspect of imagining the future proves to be troublesome for men, though generally we are totally unaware of it. Men seem to have this amazing tendency to arrange their lives around future expectations of happiness. Think about this for a moment. Doesn’t this tendency of always contemplating a future life of happiness actually reveal something about our lives in the present—that we are unfulfilled and not content?

When we are not content, looking towards the future and hoping that it will be more satisfying than our lives today is only natural. We are convinced that one day we will be happy, yet our happiness always seems to remain just beyond the horizon.