If Success Seems Out of Reach

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." – Thomas Edison, American inventor and businessman, best-known as the inventor of the light bulb (1847-1931)

Sometimes what we try to achieve isn’t successful after the first effort. If we deem it worthwhile, however, then it’s certainly worth tackling again. Maybe we need to take an end run, or change our strategy, or look for assistance or acquire new skills in order for us to be successful.

But if we really want something, we need to keep working at it. Success is as simple and as complex as that.

What do we mean by success, anyway? For some of us, success means having achieved a certain status in life, or acquiring certain assets, or having a fabulous career. Others may feel that success means having a loving family, a warm house, food on the table and that’s sufficient. In short, success means many different things. There is no single definition of success.

When we’re in recovery, however, we usually think of success as our ability to a) stay clean and sober, b) achieve our recovery goals, c) learn how to interact better with others, and d) find happiness. Of course, there are other measures of success that we could add, but these are pretty much the basics.

It’s also very likely that our concept of success, of what it takes to be a success and how we know if we are successful will change now that we’re in recovery. We’re not chained to our previous beliefs about life and what we have to achieve or not. In fact, we’re basically free to adjust our thoughts to accommodate whatever it is that we want for ourselves in sobriety.

We may, for example, determine that grinding away at our job in order to bank a sizeable savings account isn’t what we really want, after all. Money can’t buy happiness, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee success. We may discover that monetary accumulation isn’t what we place at the top of our priority list now that we’re in recovery. We may very well decide that pursuing our hopes and dreams and making incremental progress along the way is a better measure of success than anything else we previously thought.

Still, we may find ourselves anxious to get to a certain plateau, or level, in our pursuit of a goal. It may seem that the goal is forever out of our reach or that it seems just beyond, maddeningly beyond, our grasp. We want to reach that rung, climb up that ladder and achieve the goal that we’ve set for ourselves. This is particularly true with stretch goals, those achievements that really require us to go far beyond what we currently know or can do.

But remember this: All things are possible. What may seem out of reach today may very well be at one point attainable. We won’t know if we don’t continue to work at it, chipping away each and every day and making progress. Not every day will find our day’s accomplishments completed to our liking. Some days it may seem as if we’re just treading water or not making much headway. But the fact that we continue our efforts is achievement, too. It means that we are actively involved in working toward our goals, and that is a long way from where we were when we first entered recovery.

Isn’t progress, after all, just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and keeping right on going? We get where we intend to go, or we change directions, if that’s what is warranted, by the very process of moving. We’ll never get anywhere that we classify as success if we just stand still, if we fail to take action, or if we give up because we tell ourselves we’ll never make it anyway.

Let’s take first things first. Recognize that success will come to mean something different to us two months or two years from now. Strive to achieve incremental progress each day. Put everything we have into it and stop worrying about how long it will take or how hard it will be to get where we want to go, to where we think we’ll find success at some point. Each day is a success that we remain in recovery, that we’re clean and sober and committed to living a healthy and productive life in sobriety.