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Rau-Le-Creuset — Greed or Deed?
Published: 2017-12-28 16:59:58 +0000 UTC; Views: 2270; Favourites: 5; Downloads: 0
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Description The following was a post made by popular author Skye Knizley; It sums up my own feelings so succinctly that I decided to share.



Listen: Money doesn’t equal success.

Let me repeat that: Money doesn’t equal success.

It’s a lie shared most often by the people who hold the majority of wealth. Of course, they want you to believe that it is success but imagine how useless most of those people are when you take the money away.  I hate to tell you this but a lot of wealthy people can’t even check their own motor oil or catch their own food. Those Trump boys who claim to be hunters? They have no idea how to dress those animals. They aren’t hunters, they’re killers, but that is a different essay entirely.

Money isn’t success. Its just money, a valueless currency most often used by the wealthy merely as a scorecard, like my Halo rank. They have billions in the bank doing nothing useful. How, exactly, is that success? It's just greed. When was the last time you heard of an American billionaire buying a slab of land and building another Empire State? When was the last time they improved mass transit or built a train station? When was the last library or hospital built with their money? That used to be what they did, that was how success was defined, not by numbers in the bank but by deeds accomplished. Great men left behind progress, not numbers in a ledger.

That is really what is important: Deeds, not greed, and it doesn’t take wealth to accomplish something great. Buying a meal for a homeless person is a success. Donating a toy to a needy family is a success. Hugging your kid and letting them know they’re loved is a huge success. Doing things that matter is the measure of success, not keeping dollars in the bank.

Think about it. You’re going to die one day. You are, we all do. What’s the point of dying on a pile of gold? Great, you spent your life gathering wealth that ultimately is going to do nothing, so what? Or you could spend a lifetime sharing yourself with others and enjoying the real things life has to offer. I mean, when you think of the best times in your life was it buying “stuff?” Probably not. It was fishing with your dad. It was that beer you shared with a random person late at night in the airport. It was hanging with your friends on a camping trip or that adventure you took down the wrong road when you were sixteen. It’s the memories and the people you’ve met that you remember, not the “stuff.”

Living life is what makes you a success, and it is something we overlook on a regular basis. We’ve created a society that is always reaching for the next pile of gold instead of enjoying the gold that we have. We’re surrounded by advertising telling us we need the next new phone, or a bigger television, or that new car that just rolled down the street. It's nonsense. I can’t look at a man with gold toilets and think he’s a success, I think he’s an idiot. That pot of gold he covets would feed the hungry, clothe a family, build a library, contribute to the future in some way. Who gives a crap about a gold toilet? You shit in it. Taking a shit is a measure of success? Hardly.

I generally live comfortably, though like everyone I have my times when I don’t have two nickels to rub together. After spending some time homeless, I realized what I cherish are little things, not a sack of cash. I don’t need a pile of stuff. I don’t need an Aston Martin so people can ooh! and ahh! over my car. I don’t need a four thousand square foot house with five bathrooms. I don’t need any of the nonsense we’re told, as a society, equals success. When I’m gone, it's irrelevant what car I drove or where I lived or if I took a dump in a gold toilet. What matters are the lives I touched and the lives that touched mine. I give back as much as I can and my goals are filled with doing things that matter. I won’t pass into the veil with a pile of money. I’ll pass with a horde of memories, experiences, monuments and loved ones.

In the end, that’s immortality, and nobody can say living forever isn’t a success story.


I couldn't have put it into better words myself. 

Merry Christmas

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Comments: 1

SereneMountain [2023-01-18 22:04:59 +0000 UTC]

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