The West Highland Terrier Within

Personal success is an amalgam of a billion teensy shames, inadequacies and flops that you eventually put behind you. It is smiling after you’ve shut down the computer, once you’ve reread lines of what you wrote for the sixth time without making any changes. It is pride in your creativity, regardless of the number of reads, followers, comments, shares, re-tweets, likes or plain old fashioned praise.

Success is the internal feeling of loving what you’re doing in the time you have to do what you love. And then, realising there’s not enough time, stealing more time from other areas of your life that don’t need it quite so much…like bed making, cleaning the top of the microwave oven, or the grime from the bottom of the bathtub.

Success can germinate with a “fake it until you make it” mentality, but you really need to feel it within. It comes from around the place where your stomach growls after there’s been too many hours between dinner and breakfast.

“Can you feel it?”

Those words, sung by the late, quite great, Michael Jackson say it all. He also sung “I’m Bad”. If success and happiness have to get real, I think you need to be a bit bad, selfish or a bit naughty. Do what matters to the me, me, me we are; knowing it won’t kill the others in the family.