Relationships Drive All that We Do: Make the Most of Them

If life has but a single lesson for us to learn that could make or break the fragility of our everydays, it would be that relationships - personal and professional - are perhaps the most important factors contributing to everything we do and become. This is not meant to take a swipe at those personal improvement professionals who stake their treasures on advising those willing to buy their CDs, that your achievements are all about you and your self-worth, but much of your success depends on how you relate to others and, in turn, how they relate back to you.

Life is a marriage; to your wife, your family, your job, or your addiction. In managing the relationships we form, we need to be very aware that the decisions made early on can be the most critical to their longevity and value.

Sensing that this already reads like a how-to book, the lesson is over. To paraphrase a philosopher, "the rest is commentary." Learn it, learn from it.

Most of us tend to be at our very cores a little selfish. Nothing is wrong with that - it's life. We all want to get ahead and be happy, so we find ways of making that happen. Is money the key to happiness? We are always taught that it most certainly is not, yet money seems to drive us anyway.

We work; some of us even slave (it's an East Coast thing, Californians seem to have a better grasp on the work-life balance concept), because we need to pay the bills necessary to survive; if we are lucky we can even make enough to have a few things we want as well. Is that happiness? Emphatically No! But the alternative of living without the basics is certainly not appealing and unquestionably not a recipe for joy.

So here we are. As my rich uncle used to tell me when we still spoke to one another - before family financials caused our relationship to be tested before a probate judge - "Money won't buy happiness, but it makes being unhappy a hell of a lot easier." His own story is proof of that. He's an ass, but he was right.