When you refer to someone ‘having it all,’ we refer to someone we believe is a success in every facet, looking upon them in envy or maybe contempt. People will look at someone with a successful job and a beautiful family and envy what they have. The real issue is that success looks different for everyone, and ‘having it all’ is sometimes a double-edged sword.
Bishop TD Jakes once said, “The problem with being a father is that you can never get it 100. If I give you time, we don’t have money. If I give you the money, you don’t have me.” This quote is not just for men. Women also deal with the stigmas associated with ‘missing out on their family.’ Most working men miss some events and are not there to create those core memories with their families. So how do we ‘have it all’ financially and still be able to have time for our family?
A study from the University of Chicago showed that marriage, where women are financially more successful than their partners, is over 50% more likely to divorce. So that means that even women can’t have it all because then they are not as good of a mother and wives as they should be? The answer is simple: we need to shift our perspectives. Process your envy and work through it. Realize that success looks different for everyone. Concentrate on your sense of happiness and personal fulfillment. Be gracious for the life that you have. Don’t concentrate on the accomplishments of others to the extent that you negatively desire what they have and think that they don’t deserve them; merely look at their life and realize that they are happy in their life, and we must find happiness where we are. Because I will reaffirm my previous statement, success looks different for everyone!
Images
White Sands image by Eric Ward – originally posted to Flickr as Family PortraitOriginal uploader for wikimedia was AQ at de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10101463
Who doesn’t love money by Daniel Borman – Money, Money, Money, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92223843
The Pop Culture Kings present The Archives of Wisdom 