How to Live a Life Beyond Success or Failure
I was reading a list of people’s favorite books earlier this week and came across one with an interesting title. It was called Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary. Given my recent essays, I was curious what this book would have to say about being extraordinary, so I clicked over to its Amazon page to read about the book.
As I perused the book’s blurb, its sounded like a movie trailer detailing our culture’s desire to be extraordinary:
We say some people march to the beat of a different drummer. But implicit in this cliché is that the rest of us march to the same beat. We sleepwalk through life, find ourselves on well-worn paths that were never ours to walk, and become a silent extra in someone else’s story.
Extraordinary people carve their own paths as leaders and creators. They think and act with genuine independence. They stand out from the crowd because they embody their own shape and color. We call these people geniuses—as if they’re another breed. But genius isn’t for a special few. It can be cultivated.
The book jacket blurb went on to promise that if you read Awaken Your Genius, you’ll learn how to “give birth to your genius” and become “the universe-denter you were meant to be.”
While this all might sound good in the abstract, there’s one major problem: once you read the book it’s on you to go be extraordinary. By reading chapters like “Unlock the Wisdom Within” and “Unleash the Power of Play” you’re now supposed to have the insights and abilities to rise above your peers and become one of the top .001% people of all time, right there with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Marie Curie.
I’m sure the author wants to help people, but this need to be a universe-denter puts an incredible amount of pressure on his readers. As this need to be extraordinary trickles down from different streams of society, it combines to form a raging river, pressing us to go faster and faster, all in hopes of hitting this abstract and undefined ideal of success.
Here’s what’s striking, though: Jesus didn’t see being extraordinary as a goal for the good life, but rather as a temptation that would distract him from his God-given purpose. When he was in the desert, Satan tempted him to do something spectacular with his life, something that would wow the people and make them think he was extraordinary.
To do this, Satan took Jesus to the very top of the temple and encouraged him to jump off. If you’re the Son of God, Satan said, then throw yourself off of here and God’s angels will catch you. This Evil Knievel party trick could have put Jesus’ name on the map, giving him an extraordinary claim that would win over other people’s applause and give him the jump start he’d need for a popular and influential life.
But Jesus wasn’t interested in Satan’s push to be spectacular. “You must not put the Lord your God to the test,” he replied, knowing that his ministry was going to be very different from what the masses of society wanted, both then and now. As Jesus shows us, the pressure to be extraordinary might seem like a virtue, but in reality, it’s a temptation away from God’s real purpose for us.
So what are we supposed to live for then?
Recently, I was reading a book about Francis of Assisi, the Catholic friar in the 1200s who lived a simple life of radical love for others. While there are many things I could share from the book, I was most struck by a phrase that the author used to summarize Francis’ life. He said: “If your only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure.”
That phrase stopped me in my tracks. How freeing it is to recognize that life isn’t about climbing from ordinary to extraordinary, but rather about loving others. When you use your gifts, opportunities, and time to love others, you can stop using simplistic categories like success or failure to judge yourself, since God is using your life for His purposes whether you ever see big results or not.
This isn’t a message that they’ll ever give you a big book deal to write about or share at a 10,000-person conference. It is the message, though, of a life radically reshaped by Jesus’ love. As Jesus gave his final instructions to his disciples in the upper room, he didn’t stress their need to awaken their genius, escape conformity, develop their creativity, and live an extraordinary life. Instead, he said:
I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.
When we focus on our lives on loving others, it sets us from the constant analysis of whether we’re a success or failure and lets us entrust the results of our lives to God. Our lives become all about becoming a living sacrifice to honor and worship God, rather than climbing the ladder of success to get other people’s honor and worship.
The Bible is clear: loving others, not self-achievement, is the engine at the heart of a healthy and God-glorifying life. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, achievement without love is of little use:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Sadly, despite how often we hear this passage read at weddings, we have no interest in letting its message shape the values of our lives, even within the Christian church.
But while we struggle to love others, Jesus did so perfectly. He refuted Satan’s temptation to be extraordinary and used his life to serve and love us, humbling himself to follow God’s will for his life, even to the point of being put to death on the cross.
When we experience Jesus’ life-giving love, it changes us from the inside out, redirecting our lives from self-centered achievement to sacrificial love. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
Now, the Holy Spirit works in us to make us more loving, using the day-to-day events of our lives to show how Christ’s love has changed us. This might seem too slow and ordinary for our in-a-hurry culture, but a loving life in service to God isn’t a little life, but rather one that’ll be exalted in God’s kingdom for all of time. That’s why Paul says in Philippians 2 that as a result of Jesus’ ordinary, love-filled life, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.
While it’s not easy to believe that God will do the same to us, especially when Satan tempts us to think that we’ll be a failure if we don’t do something extraordinary, we can trust that God will treat us the same way as Jesus, exalting our little acts of love through His eternal kingdom.
