success
What is the measure of success?
I’ve thought about this often. I expect most people, if you really pressed them, could give you specific details for what they would consider a successful life. It may be obtaining a job, reaching a level of popularity, achieving world-changing accomplishment, getting married to someone, reaching an amount of wealth, living to a certain age, becoming a member of a group, etc.
We all want something out of life and quite often, we don’t yet have the thing we want.
But the problem with success is that we believe once we obtain it, we’ll be completely happy and utterly fulfilled. Often, whether we reach our far away measure of success or not, we end up disappointed.
This disappointment can be soul-crushing at times. The many tragic celebrity stories of the past bear witness to this.
Toward that end, I found hope and inspiration from the experience and advice offered by K.M. Weiland in this lovely article:
6 Lifestyle Changes You Can Make to Protect Creativity
The way we measure success is important, but before we even get there, we ought to consider how we define it.
In Derek Doepker’s book, Why Authors Fail, he points out that success and failure can work for or against us based on how we define them.
His argument is that we should view success as a process, not an event. The same goes with failure.
If you only see success as achieving some milestone, then you’ll have some problems: first, if you don’t reach your goal, you will feel the weight of discouragement and failure. But if you do reach your goal, despite failures and setbacks along the way, the glorious feeling of achievement only lasts a little while. When it passes, you’re on to the next thing or stuck trying to repeat or hold to what you just did in order to keep the blissful feeling of success. You’re constantly searching for success, but never truly reaching it because there will always be something more, something bigger you can do.
If success is a process, then you can be continually successful, not just when you reach a goal.
As long as you are doing the right thing today, you are living in success.
Doesn’t that sound more rewarding than basing your success on some far-offgoal?
Sure, you’re not gonna bat a thousand every day—you’ll have good and bad days—but you will have the same opportunity every day.
Not only will success always be an option, it’ll be within reach. With this mindset, success is right in front of your nose, or rather, between your ears.
I believe every day is an opportunity to decide, and reach, your measure of success. So here’s to a successful today.