Happiness and Success

Today I've been thinking about 2 quotes that I feel sum up the direction I've been moving in my blog this past year.  My aim when I started this blog was merely to reflect on my thoughts and wonderings as an IT teacher.  It's been a great way of documenting my thoughts and what has been influencing these thoughts, a way of recording new things I've been trying out and reflecting on how successful they are and what needs to change to make them more successful.  Today I came across this quotation from Ozge Karaoglu that for me summed up the benefits of blogging:

To blog is a way to realize what you think, what you achieve and what you want to do in the future because it is reading, thinking, reflecting, writing, connecting, learning and more than that.

For me I feel that blogging has been enormously successful in helping me to be a better thinker, to reflect in a deeper way and to connect with others who have pushed my thinking forward or in different directions.  I read another quote recently (unfortunately I can't remember where I read this). Herman Cain says:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.  If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Sir Ken Robinson put it in a nice way in one of his video responses to questions on Twitter.  He said that if you love something you are good at, you never have to "work" again.  So when people ask me how I find the time to blog so much, I guess the reason is that it doesn't feel like work, it's something I do almost as a hobby, in my free time, that gives me satisfaction.  My husband thinks I feel the same about teaching - that it's something I do because I enjoy it and because of that I do a good job and no matter how many hours I put into it, it doesn't seem like 'hard' work.  (I tend to disagree with this, usually around report writing time).


Photo Credit:  Free Pocketful of Rainbows by D. Sharon Pruitt