The famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina, offers a wealth of insight and understanding. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Tolstoy built an entire novel on this one sentence.  He demonstrated that in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.  Failure in any one essential element can doom a marriage even if all the other ingredients needed for success and happiness are present.  All it takes to drive a relationship to destruction is one missing element!  However when all the pieces are present the whole is greater than the sum of the parts creating a relationship that radiates love and harmony.  This same principle can be extended to understand much more about life than just marriage.

The path to success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.  Navigation is the most complex of all thought processes because it does not just involve arriving at a predetermined location it also means not choosing millions of other possibilities.  Because avoiding many separate possibilities of failure is much more mentally fatiguing than concentrating on a single factor we have a tendency to assume that “success” is somewhere we arrive instead of the many places we don’t go.  Maybe that is why so few people actually experience the kind of success they think they are capable of achieving.  They have never learned that success is saying “no” a thousand times for every “yes”.

Unfortunately we tend to seek easy, single–factor explanations for success in any area of life.  Millions have bought into “get rich quick” schemes because they are so much more appealing than the real work of discipline and discernment!  The same philosophy has been used to sell weight loss programs, body building supplements, medications and drugs in general.  Even spirituality has many times been approached with the same concept of one size fits all!

Some are so convinced that success was due to a magic bullet because that was the critical factor they were missing.  They generally think that what brought them success is the solution for everybody else.  A powerful personal testimony combined with the evidence of success makes it tempting to buy into “their solution” instead of asking God what you need.

One of the greatest obstacles to success, achieving our dreams or accomplishing our goals is blindness to our own weak link(s): our imperfections or character flaws.  Stress increases and the internal pressures build as we keep working harder and harder only to fall prey to the law of diminishing returns all the while blinded to the answer.

The solution brings us back to the family both terrestrial and celestial.  Marriage came before the fall, survived sin and is waiting for us in heaven because it identifies our weaknesses and gives us an opportunity to grow mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  According to extensive research the happiest and most successful people in life have been in a long term relationship.  A man and woman submitted to each other are more humble, open-minded and capable of being educated and changed than either one alone.

Friends are closer than family when they risk telling us the truth in love.  We need the perspective of someone we trust to help us see the gap in our lives that is creating failure.

Rocky J. Malloy