Let's Talk About Success

What does it mean to be successful? A college degree? A certain career? A family with 2.5 kids and a dog? What units should we be using to measure the quality of our lives? Surely you've been to a family event, or ran into old classmates, and the first thing everyone wants to do is measure your success. 

"What do you do for a living?" 

"Are you seeing anyone?" 

"What did you get your degree in?"

So often we are taught that these are the kind of things we should use to measure our self worth. However, I believe that success is in the eye of the beholder.

Personally, I have taken to measuring my own success in happiness. If I wake up happy and go to sleep happy, that was a successful day. If I wake up happy and go to sleep happy a majority of the time, I feel like that’s a successful life. And if I can manage to leave the people I interact with happier than they were before our encounter, then I’m successful as a human being.

I have a job that some people would consider successful. It’s in a professional environment, with full time hours, benefits, and everything else my family always wanted for me. But am I happy? Do I feel fulfilled? Or do I wake up every day dreading the next 10 hours and praying for the weekend? (That may be a separate blog post entirely, but for now I digress.)

What we do is not who we are. We can’t let others define our personal success. People will tell you day after day that you should have a career by this age, and a family by that age. Do you have a 401k and your own car? Who decided that these things were requirements? Did some random person wake up one day and say, “I don’t think that 20-something can be considered successful without a high credit score.”? Society will judge you and try to define you one way or another, but ultimately you will decide if you’re living a life that is successful by your terms.

And maybe you will measure it by your career, or your car, or your bank account. Or maybe you’ll measure it by how often you smile, or all of the times you laugh until your stomach hurts. Maybe you’ll measure it in your satisfaction from a perfect cup of coffee in the morning, or in the view at the top of a challenging hike.

Maybe you’ll decide to conform to everyone else’s idea of your success. Or maybe you will forge your own path, knowing that you only get one shot at living your life for you.

The choice is yours.