Success at what cost?

Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter. Francis Chan

I love the way this is put. Failure means at the very least that you went for it. And that you went for it hard and that it mattered. Success, or what appears to be success, as you go along the way in the little things that don't truly matter is the cowards way out. Ouch. That kind of hurts doesn't it? Can you think of something that doesn't matter but people strive to succeed at?
One that comes to mind immediately is the struggle for power/control. One might argue with me that it does matter and I would respond with two things: one, it really doesn't matter in the big picture and two, you have proven to me and others that in your attempts to convince us that power/control does matter you strive to succeed in it. Oddly enough the people who strive to succeed at power/control are usually very afraid of failure and they use the need for power/control to cover up the fear of failure in their lives. I call that a vicious circle. Get off the merry-go-round! In the example of power/control people end up, perhaps, succeeding in a title - a status - a position but they end up failing in the bigger things. They fail to gain respect of peers and others, they fail at genuine relationships, they fail at teamwork, they fail at being a positive participant in this life. I don't know about you but I'd much rather forgo efforts to succeed at power/control and succeed at life. The cost of failure in genuine life is too great a price to pay for the appearance of success (for it isn't true or real success).

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A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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