One of the people that I absolutely love, as well as deeply admire and respect is Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show”.  Chris and I ditched cable, but still ‘watch’ “The Daily Show” online the immediate morning after the broadcast. 

He is my ‘Jason Bateman’, if you will; charming, self-deprecating, funny, yet insanely insightful.  (And adorable.  Yes, I said it.)

YouTube is an actual treasure trove of his Oscar moments, interviews, and the infamous “Crossfire” incident.  His show, if you don’t know, is a total satire of a cable news show. 

They routinely poke fun at politicians on both sides of the aisle, the media, and the American people.  Yet politicians clamor to be on the “The Daily Show”, members of the media kill themselves to attend his informal ‘meet and greets’, and the American people have made him the edgy and relevant voice of the ‘people’.

In interviews, you can often tell that the interviewer is playfully envious of his success.  While people covet his cachet, it is clear that in his mind he is merely the host of a basic cable tv show.  I don’t know what Jon Stewart considers “success’, but he may not be it, while many television pundits would kill for the kind of cultural impact he has. 

But if Jon Stewart – an author, a comedian, a public provocateur – isn’t “Success!”, them who is?  How high do you have to get, how important do you have to be, to bring that dream of success to fruition?

By all accounts, Jimmy Carter is universally acclaimed as the worst president in modern day history.  But he was President!  Leader of the free world!  Yet no one considered him a ’success’ until he put his heart and soul into a little project called Habitat for Humanity.

There will always be someone ‘ahead’ of us – someone who has more money, a bigger house, a better blog, or a happier marriage.  It’s a ‘dream horizon’ that never gets any closer but is always tantalizingly in reach.

Let go of the ‘dream horizon’. 

Engage your passions. 

Do what you love.

Though Jimmy Carter, clearly, always wanted to be in service to others, it wasn’t until he was truly in service to others – versus the political maneuvering that you hope is in service to others – that he truly came into his own. 

The closer he was to engaging his passion, the closer he was to “success”.

Another phenomenal effect of discovering and engaging your passions is that it takes you ‘out’ of your self.  For the time you are engaged in the action of your passion, ‘time flies when you are having fun’ because you are completely disconnected from any sense of it.  Six hours later you wonder “Where did the day go?”

Much of personal development and self-growth can create a sort of insular feedback loop.  In trying to change the self, you focus on the self, which causes you to focus on changing the self, which causes you to focus on the self once again.

Yeah, my head hurts too.

Don’t focus on your self.  Don’t focus on your ‘horizon’ of success.  Focus on the things that make you feel alive, that make you more your self the more it takes you out of that self; the things that make living a joy.  We in the United States have a three-day weekend approaching.  How will you spend that weekend?  What would you do if it was the last weekend of your life?

What would your life look like if you lived that way now?