Acting true to yourself is the best and I dare say only way to succeed in life.

I’ve talked here and elsewhere numerous times about my failed gray flannel insurance career as a young woman.

The longer you cut yourself off from expressing yourself, the longer you’re restricted from becoming who you are, you’re going to get ill and make yourself miserable.

This is especially true for artists and other creative souls who are told from an early age to do something practical that makes money. Yet why can’t we have a good life doing the things we love that also earn us income?

You can work as an accountant during the day and play drums in a jazz band on the weekend to find your thrill. Or you can save up all your money from working as an accountant, retire, and dare to devote your life to jazz drumming full-time.

Seeing the possibilities is a gift because not everyone will take the baton and run with it when another person passes us an idea for what we can do.

I see the possibilities, and I recommend each of us grabs the baton of an idea of what we want to do, and runs with it.

Years ago I read that the thinking shifted in experts’ minds: it’s now thought a person can grow and change throughout our lives, that our personalities are not set in stone like previously thought.

We have the gift of a lifetime–we have our whole lives–to set goals and reach for them. We don’t need to conform to what others in society tell us we must do or how we must act. That kind of judging has to stop and the sooner the better.

I’m an artist as well as a writer. I’m a fitness buff, and a cook when the spirit moves me. I realized long ago that acting false to yourself creates ill-health.

In my Left of the Dial blog on the WordPress site I wrote that I value what others bring to the table: that you don’t have to have an Ivy-league pedigree in my book to be considered successful in your own right.

Acting true to yourself is the best way to succeed in my estimation because constantly straining to go against your nature sets you up to fail.

It’s OK if a person has no ambition. It’s OK if she wants to rule the world.

Either way, I doubt any of us can be truly happy operating against ourselves.

Having the courage to like ourselves and be happy with ourselves just the way we are is the way to go.

If we’re not satisfied with our lives or with any aspect of ourselves, we can take action today to change things for the better.