Life is full of empty promises of contentment.
Self-help books line the shelves and infomercials sell sermon DVD packages for the hot price of $29.99 — each promising to lead your wretched soul to success.
Any of us can agree that consumerism fuels our increasingly materialistic world. We spend all of our time and money hyping ourselves up about how to make a change in our lives instead of actually acting on what we need to change.
Society attempts to convey the falsified reality that you either need a twelve step program or magic pill to reach personal success. This commercial facade obscures the truth.
The key to attaining personal success is in finding contentment in small means such as goal-setting to accomplish true fulfillment. While most can agree with this, we continue to buy into the scheme that has become the process of contentment.
In an act of proving my own willpower and testing my hypothesis, I set out a goal for myself- a task that typically would seem impossible to conquer- to stop biting my nails.
It began as a habit of boredom that stayed with me until now. I set my goal a few weeks ago, after a brief melodramatic episode, concerning a boy who “didn’t like me back”.
A friend had to help me acknowledge that I could do nothing to change the situation. I was better off focusing on moving forward than dwelling, noting the difference between problems that I can and cannot change. This stopped me in my tracks.
This was a problem that no magic pill or twelve step program had a chance of fixing.
Yes, I was incapable of altering another human being’s feelings towards me. But it was then that I realized.. there are too many things in the world that we have absolutely no control over to allow validation of our inaction towards the things we can change.
That next day, I stopped biting my fingernails. Cold turkey.
I set my mind to it and made it happen. Without the help of any 12 step program, I accomplished my goal.
Leading me to realize the undeniable certainty that the path to success is paved by small accomplishments and neat fingernails, rather than any mass-produced key towards personal contentment.