Alchemy, the study of turning one thing into another, was the precursor to chemistry. Alchemy itself seems to have been part science, part magic, part wishful thinking.
Because, as it turns out, you can’t turn lead into gold. Lead and gold are different things. No matter how much lead you accumulate, you can’t stare at it long enough, chant loud enough, or wish hard enough to turn it into gold. You can mix stuff into lead to create new alloys—that’s chemistry—but you can’t take your pile of lead and just turn it into something else.
Yet lots and lots of people still practice alchemy even today. You know a lot of them.
You may be one of them.
Modern day alchemists aren’t trying to turn lead into gold. They’re trying to turn gold into happiness.
Are you one of them? If you are… good luck with that.
See, success and happiness are different things. Depending on the emotional outlook one has, success and happiness can appear as if they are the same thing, or appear to depend upon one another, but they don’t, any more than lead and gold do.
They’re even created through totally different means. Happiness occurs when you have the right outlook on life, success occurs when you bust your behind.
See? Different.
But there is good news: alchemy may not work, but there is still a way to get what you want.
Though success and happiness are different, happiness can sometimes catalyze the creation of success. If you can resist the temptation to try to “buy happiness”—modern day parlance for “turning lead into gold”—and work the experiment from the other direction, you may find you do just fine.
And that’s a good thing.
Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.
I'm the CEO of Ajax Social Media. We're helping 1 million people shine by making their online stories better. 