See your own success and happiness, and the world will see it.

"The way in which we see ourselves has everything to do with how the world sees us.  Seeing ourselves as successful is how we become successfully acknowledged by the world."
 -- Arlene Raven

"Happiness has no prerequisite other than life itself.  It comes from the way you choose to live and respond to the world, not from the way the world responds back."
-- Ralph Marston

These are tricky and paradoxical statements.  We all learn while growing up how to respond to external circumstances by watching others respond to theirs and then processing our own emotional experiences through learned models of interpretation.  For example, if we get demoted or lose our job we feel disappointed and sad.  This is similar to what we learned when we came home with a bad grade.  We've learned to see this as failure.  We then begin to interact with the world through the eyes of fearing failure or, worse yet, considering ourselves failures.  We can then use this perspective to create more stress for ourselves through working  desperately hard to avoid these feelings,  or we can consider ourselves unfortunate victims of external forces, thereby creating more disappointment and failure.  

Fortunately, we have a model of a vastly different way of looking at things in nature, and we can learn a lot from it.  For example, when it rains we have multiple ways to look at it before we choose to act out of a particular belief about it.  If we have something outdoors we wanted to do, we get disappointed and resentful of the rain and we carry that doom and gloom around with us and create more of it.  If we were thinking how badly our crops, gardens, and lawns needed rain, or if we were especially tuned in to the serene beauty of a rainy day, we feel deeply moved by the rain, its purpose, the perfection of nature's design.  In the peacefulness of this emotional and mental state, experiences and life tend to show up as magical.  It all exists, and then gets re-created, in how we see it.  "Failure" is nothing more than the doorway, and the training ground, for future successes.  It has a profoundly important purpose and is part of a grand design.  Removing the fear of it, and/or the stigma attached to it, sheds new light for us on how to experience the powerful essence of the messages above in our daily reality.  We really do get to make it up.