The Best Definition of Love: How it Helps You Achieve Success and Happiness
Written by Pete Bowen on April 24, 2023
What is the best definition of love? How does love help you achieve success and happiness?
Summary
- What is Love? The Best Definition of Love
- Love is the Key to Success and Happiness
- Leadership and Love
- Love is a Skill—Make it a Habit
- Love, Wisdom, and Maturity
What is Love?
The best definition: Love is wanting what is best for someone and doing something about it.
Love has three parts to it:
- A desire/feeling
- A focus on what is best for another
- Action to help the other
Love must have all three.
Action to help the other can be as simple as bringing them joy with a smile or greeting. Providing advice, coaching, or mentoring. Opening a door or giving up a parking space. Love can be as deep as sacrificing your life to save another. Love is helping your family and friends grow through life to become happy, successful people.
Desiring/using someone for your own pleasure or profit is not love, because that is focused on you and not what is best for the other. Treating someone as an object instead of a person can never be love.
Similarly, helping someone do something evil, harmful, or unhealthy is never what is best for the other person, so it can’t be love.
Types of Love
There are many types of love including:
- Philia—Deep brotherly/sisterly love for friends. Think Philadelphia—the City of Brotherly Love
- Eros—Intense, irrational, passionate love often associated with sexual desire
- Agape—Love so deep that you’re willing to sacrifice your life for another
Love is the Key to Happiness and Success
Love gives you the best chance for success and happiness in life.
According to the famous Harvard Study on Adult Development, happiness in life comes from good relationships.
Our lives are filled with relationships:
- At home with family and friends
- At work with clients and colleagues
- In our communities with neighbors and citizens
- In your relationship with yourself
Whether at work or at home, the most committed, trusting, and strongest relationships are based on love, not power or money.
That means love is the foundation for the relationships that bring happiness.
What about success? Love-based relationships are the highest performing relationships. Grounding your relationships in love gives you the best chance for success in your relationships with family, friends, and at work.
Here’s an example. As a leader at work, the more your clients trust you, the more business they will give you. The more your people trust you, the more engagement and productivity they will give you. Combine more business and more productivity, and you will have a big advantage over competitors, giving you the best chance for success at work.
Whether it’s family, friends, or work, love-based relationships are the key to happiness and success in life.
Agape Love Gets the Strongest Relationships
The strongest relationships have the deepest commitment.
Ground your relationships in Agape Love. There is no greater commitment than the willingness to sacrifice yourself for others. That’s why we admire first responders and the military. They are willing to sacrifice their lives—practice Agape Love—to save and defend us.
Practice Agape Love to get the highest trust and highest performance relationships possible.
No matter what the relationship—family, friends, work, community—love is the foundation for the high trust, high performance relationships that give you the best chance for happiness and success in life.
Leadership and Love
Whether you are a leader at work, at home, or in the community, the better you are at love, the more trust, commitment, and performance you’ll get from your team. The more you practice love, the better leader you will become. And that leads too…
Love is a Skill: Turn Love into a Habit
Love is not just a feeling. Love is also action that we take to help others.
That means love is a skill. Love something you can practice and get good at, like playing a musical instrument, playing a game, or being a friend. Practice love until it becomes a habit—part of your character and being.
Consider it another way. You become what you do. Every time you practice love, it changes you into a more loving person. And that strengthens all your relationships.
The more love becomes a fundamental part of your character/being, the more you will naturally develop great relationships in all areas of your life—work, family, friends, and community.
Love and Wisdom
How can you know if you’re in romantic love?
How can you know what is best for another?
How can you tell if a relationship is good/healthy or bad/unhealthy?
The key to answering all these questions is wisdom.
Wisdom is the knowledge that comes from experience. The more experience you have in relationships and life, the more maturity you have, the more wisdom you will possess. The wisdom and maturity you develop practicing love and relationships will give you the best knowledge to answer questions about love.
The more wisdom you have, the better you can identify good people and start great relationships with them.
The more wisdom you have, the better you will judge your romantic relationships, know whether you are in the right kind of love for a healthy, life-long relationship.
The more wisdom you have, the better you can identify problem people and avoid bad relationships with them.
The more wisdom and maturity about love you bring into relationships, the more successful your relationships will be.
Wrapping It Up
The best definition of love is: Love is wanting what is best for another and doing something about it.
Happiness and success come from strong, high trust, high performance relationships.
Agape Love—the willingness to sacrifice your life for another—gets the deepest commitment and the strongest relationships.
Practice love in all your relationships until it becomes a habit, part of your character/being. That will give you the best foundation and wisdom to naturally develop the relationships that give you the best chance for happiness and success in life.
Got a question about love? Ask in the comments or via email.
