Cereal Theory: Why Achieving Success is as Simple as Eating Your Breakfast

By Seamus Anthony

achieving successBy Seamus Anthony

Part One

I was sleepily sipping my tea one morning, watching my kids munching on their bowls of cereal, when suddenly it just popped into my head:

“Achieving Success is as Simple as Eating Your Breakfast”.

I am kind of a tripper and used to these colourful thoughts arriving unannounced so I stuck with the idea and thought it through. By the time the kids had finished their breakfast I had the following list of “proofs” about my shiny new Cereal Theory of Success.

 

Proof #1 – You Eat Breakfast Every Day

Unless you are deliberately trying to mess with your metabolism you eat breakfast every day, right? Apparently, it’s the most important meal.

Well, in order to succeed, you must succeed every day too. In other words, the trick to success is to be successful.

Success is not a future event – it happens now. That’s why I get to write this blog – because I am successful now.

For years the voice of fear kept telling me that I wasn’t successful enough to write about achieving success, that I needed to make my millions first, that I simply wasn’t qualified. However, one day my mind, scooting down the mental highway at about one zillion miles per hour, just overtook that crap and I realised that:

  • I am successful every day…
  • and so are you.

Every time we breathe we are achieving success. And consider the odds we beat to even exist? We were all conceived because we won a mad, struggling, wriggling race against several billion competitors to make it to the egg first. Do you know the odds entailed?

So who says we aren’t still successful now? Your TV? Your best friend? Your boss? Yourself?

 

Achieving Success = [Whatever You Decide]

Success is a just concept.

It’s just an idea.

A ghost.

When you realise how silly and trite and empty the concept of achieving success is you realise that you are not bound to some law that says you are only successful “when”. Actually, you get to decide when you are successful and when you are not, and one thing’s for sure – success begets more success. The secret to success is to be successful. So once you decide you are a success, you will naturally continue to succeed as long as you keep your head screwed on and keep doing successful things.

This realisation changed me. It enabled me to hold my head high and realise that I am worthy. And self-worth is important. For all my cocksure posturing over the years, onstage and off, the thing that has always held me back is a lack of self-worth – but when you bypass that shit and leave it floundering on the side of the highway choking on your dust, that’s when you start to kick some serious butt.

I used to obsess about success but framed it as a future event that I was striving to achieve, but eventually I flipped the perspective and instead considered my life:

  • my beautiful family,
  • my well-paid freelance work-in-my-pyjamas business,
  • my health,
  • my wonderful friends,
  • my music and all the awesome experiences that come with being a musician
  • how I had lost weight lately,
  • the things in life I have enjoyed,
  • the experiences I have shared and rejoiced in,
  • my talents and passions,
  • that flower over there – look!
  • the challenges I have overcome
  • the peace that I am able to enjoy in this moment.

No debtors banging on the door. No stressful, unsupportable lifestyle. No hated job to rush off to. No fear of the unknown. Just a peaceful curiosity about what this day will bring, an expectation of positive experiences and interesting, challenging and ultimately fulfilling work and family life.

Thinking about my life from this perspective of gratitude, something in me shifted in a moment and suddenly I realised that I AM successful – that I know how to achieve success and that I do it every day, more and more, without really thinking about it too hard or getting too stressed that often.

It suddenly popped into my brain that achieving success is kind of like eating your breakfast – you just do it every day, it’s enjoyable and not something that you worry about or feel is too hard or out of reach. You just decide what you’re going to tackle, grab your spoon and eat it. And it tastes good, so you savour it along the way.

Success is yummy. Success is crunchy. And all you have to do is just pour it out of the box and into your bowl – then grab a spoon and start munching until you finish the bowl and you’re full. So tuck in dude, tuck in…

Part Two of my amazingly stupendous and dazzlingly unifying Cereal Theory of Success continues next week…

You can download both parts of this blog series as a mini-ebook for free, no email required, right here.

 

Hi, I'm Seamus Anthony. I am an author, artist and musician from Australia. Here at Rebel Zen, I document my journey as an creative artist and human and in doing so, hopefully help you in your own progress through your life of creativity. Go get your free E-book by me: "Taming The Monkey Mind".

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