The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

July 26Judge Not Success

They talk of short-lived pleasure—be it so— / Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain / Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. / The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; / And after dreams of horror, comes again / The welcome morning with its rays of peace;

William Cullen Bryant—“Mutation: A Sonnet,” Poems of William Cullen Bryant (1824)

Pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy, failure and success—these pairs of seeming opposites also bear striking similarities.

We judge the first of each pair as a negative experience while we claim to be seeking the second of each pair as our eventual path to happiness.

The problem with judging pretty much anything as good or bad is that it's mostly a form of self-judgment.

In her book The Judgment Detox, Gabrielle Bernstein defines judgment as “the separation of oneness and the truth within us.” She further offers that “judgment is a signal of a wound that needs to be healed.”

Ironically, our judgment of what defines success may be the very thing that hinders our journey toward it.

The first step on the path to nonjudgment is to appreciate how often we automatically judge everything in our environment as either right and wrong and, in doing so, limit our own options for success.

You don't have to judge anything; simply be open to what you feel and move on. Drop your limiting beliefs and “welcome morning with its rays of peace.”

Challenge Question

1. What's one thing you frequently pass judgment on? How can ...