When success comes quickly, as a result of hard work meeting opportunity, one tends to forget that it may not always continue on trend.

Like me, most people do not “hit it big”. We tend to take a more circuitous(迂回的) route toward success. Believe that great success is not always be given the lucky but those who go after it long and diligently.

Recently I have conversations with many people that are in the “success” stage, not happy where they currently are or feeling “unsuccessful”. Society has made us confirm that we need to be wealthy in order to be successful. I tell them not to get on the “way off track”. Success doesn’t have to be financial, it could be relationships, it could be fulfilling your passions, and it could be your health level. I know many successful people that are not wealthy but are rich in their career or spirit. The worst thing people can do is chase the “money” by any kind of means. Success is made by serving others, and in turn, you will get the rewards of financial success.

It’s not easy travelling down the roads of patience, risk and uncertainty. You must stay flexible because the road to success is always under construction. You must concentrate because someone or something will throw a roadblock in the middle of the road. So, get ready for difficulty and delays. Stop worrying about failure.

The road to success is not a straight line, it’s over mountains and down in the valleys. With persistence and belief, you will most certainly get there. Trust you will have powerful and new breakthroughs as long as you get rid of the hurdle of self-doubt and never give up. And, even if all else fail, remind yourself that: I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years,” as people believe; both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence (吊唁) calls on the two families on the same afternoon.

At the first home, the son of the deceased (已故的) woman said to me, “If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “If only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.”

When things don’t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course — keeping Mother at home, and postponing the operation — would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?

There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilty. The first is our pressing need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.

The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence (万能). A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen.

One evening, when I asked my 17-year-old son, Ray, for help with dinner, his response took me by surprise. “What’s a colander (漏勺)?” he asked.

I could only blame myself. In the family, nobody’s hands went in the sauce except my own. But as I explained with a touch of panic that a colander is the thing with holes in it, I wondered what else I hadn’t prepared Ray for. Suddenly it hit me: He’d be leaving the house in a year to attend college. No way was I going to send a spoiled prince into the world.

As parents, while focusing on our children’s character, we are also raising someone’s future roommate, husband, or father. I’d raise a boy who would never ask the woman in his life, “What’s for dinner?” So, I came up with a plan to offer Ray a private home economics course. Gladly, he didn’t say no. For two hours, three days a week, Ray was all mine. One day, as his tomato sauce reduced on the stove, he washed and seasoned a chicken for roasting. Then he rolled out the pie crust(大馅饼皮) and filled it with apples, while listening to my explanation for the importance of preheating an oven.

One day we covered Advanced Laundry, in which I taught him never to mix a red sweatshirt with white ones. I knew that he would rather have been shooting hoops in the driveway than learning to mend socks with his mother—he tried to beg off sewing lessons—but it couldn’t be denied that he was learning, and more than just housekeeping. “I appreciate what you do as a mom,” he told me one day.

Ray now understands the finer points of cooking, and more importantly, he realizes there’s nothing masculine(男子气概的) about being helpless. Not only can he make his own dinner, but also he can make a big meal for his family. That’s what I call a man.