Meeting of Minds brings you fresh perspectives on challenges you face in your life, and offers you concrete suggestions for dealing with them. This first issue
of Meeting of Minds helps you choose the right goal(s) in your pursuit of success.

When I was 10, attending a primary school in the communist China, my biggest wish was to act like a hero my age who had leaped into a pond to save a drowning pig. "The People's Commune's pig was saved," praised the propaganda media, “but our little Young Pioneer sacrificed his precious life for the communist cause.” I looked around for a drowning pig, but never found one.

In 1977, the newspapers and loudspeakers lauded a new hero who, for the first time, was not a worker, peasant or soldier, but a scientist. Chen Jing Run proved the equation: 1+2=3. He won praise from his peers abroad. He earned honour for our communist motherland.

I wanted to become a scientist, to make an important discovery and bring honour to my motherland. I studied hard. In 1980, of the 108 graduates in my high school, I was the only one who passed the national university entrance exam and was admitted to a key university to study chemistry.

In Wuhan University, I found out that I didn't enjoy studying chemistry. But I didn't want to give up my dream of being a scientist. I went on to pursue graduate studies, thinking that, perhaps, it is research, not studying, that makes a real scientist. I did not enjoy research. In 1988 I came to Canada with the final hope that the advanced research environment would eventually unleash my scientist ability.

On the contrary, I gave up my dream in 1991. The experience of forcing myself to work hard on something that I didn’t enjoy was painful, and eventually, unbearable.

During all those years, I defined success as achieving a goal that I set up for myself, a goal that was based on a trendy social value, not on my own innate interest, or whether I enjoyed doing the work required to realize that goal.

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In our society, I sense an imbalanced view of the importance of goals and experiences. Success is mostly measured by achieved goals, not by enjoyed experiences, which often leads many of us to pursue goals without considering whether we would enjoy the experience in achieving those goals.

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In the nearly hundred interviews conducted with highly successful artists, entrepreneurs, statesmen and scientists, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (http://www.wie.org/j21/csiksz.asp) discovered that they enjoy working more than the general population does. In their words, “You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.” Because their work experiences in realizing their goals are so enjoyable, they have ceased to consider their work as work. They have chosen the right goals!

Yes, success is not as much as about achieving goals as many of us have believed. It is also about the enjoyment we derive from the experiences while we work towards realizing our goals.

To share your thoughts and/or experience with this exercise, you may browse or post notes on The Ping Way's forum, click here, http://www.thepingway.com/forum/index.php

The content in this issue is an excerpt from The Ping Way's Personal Growth Program: Flow Into Your Potential.