It's All Relative

Happiness is so simple it becomes difficult. Feeling content can come from an infinity of different things, and it usually comes from your environment or an experience. Easy things. People easily forget that simplicity can be a good thing. In our society today, people are constantly busy. Parents have their one million errands or their long work hours or both. Students have an enormous amount of pressure to be in as many extracurricular activities as they’re allowed, sometimes to their disadvantage.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and even texting exhorts people to focus on their activities and compare how much and how well they are doing to someone else’s life. But happiness, much like success, should not be something we compare to others.

“Success” is a unique word; it can change with each person’s opinion, or even their dream. Jacksgap, a blog that was brought to my attention through a lazy day on YouTube, has teamed up with Skype to highlight the lives of three women who use Skype to achieve their dreams and spread their passion. The last mini film has not been released yet. However, the first two subjects of the project known as Following Heart are very similar. Jillian Morris is a shark conservationist in the Bahamas and Danielle Turano is a violinist and violin teacher in New york. But that’s not what makes them so alike. What does is the fact that these two women have a passion that is so great, a little thing like distance does not stop them from reaching their goals. They both use Skype: Morris to speak with classrooms across the world about sharks and Turano to teach students on the other side of the country or students who can’t make it to Turano’s studio. Morris is making a difference for the shark species because she is sharing her love of sharks with as many lives as she can to help keep the species from going extinct. “I can hope that each day I am able to connect with one person and maybe it changes their mind", says Morris. “Maybe now they’re not afraid... or they want to learn more. That’s powerful because change happens one person at a time.” In Morris’s eyes, she finds herself successful because she is spreading awareness and love for a dying species. She is doing something she loves and she is spreading that love to others. That is why she is successful.

Danielle Turano (top) and Jillian Morris (bottom right)
http://jacksgap.com/announcing-new-collaboration-jacksgap-x-skype/

Turano is successful for the same reason. She believes that if she can teach one person how to be passionate about music and the violin, she is successful. “Everyone has a dream. One of my dreams is to see a student of mine go on to bigger stages and better things than I myself have accomplished. I would know in that moment… I shared with them everything I had so that they would be prepared to go on” says Turano. By following their dreams, Morris and Turano are more successful than most people even though their income is not the highest. To them, their happiness and their ability to spread their happiness to others is what defines their success, simple as that.

My hypothesis is that people who spread their happiness to others are more successful than those who start and idea based on their own end game. However, I now realize happiness and success do not have a set definition. Maybe that is why we feel a need to compare our lives with one another, to post and tweet and capture each thing we do. Maybe, even though it makes my hypothesis obsolete, we should stop trying to measure intangible ideas because, one, they physically cannot be measured and, two, it’s all relative.