What does success mean to you?

What does success mean to you?

Does it mean being rich, having a nice house and a bunch of nice things?

Does it mean having good relationships with those around you?

Does it mean achieving what those around you want for you?

Everyone has a different idea.

The truth is how others define success does not matter.

What matters is how you define success.

Know there are achievements that have existed for millennia for how people have defined success, and for most of those that achieve it, it falls short of expectation.

Money will not make you happy.

All it does is amplify who you are.

If you’re miserable already, becoming rich will make you more miserable.

If you’re already happy, it will allow you the freedom to pursue the things you want.

But this chase for dollar signs that the western capitalist world seems so focused on sometimes feels trivial.

It’s easy for me to say this coming from privilege, but even those who have worked all their lives and achieved a certain balance in their bank account can still be miserable.

They have thousands of dollars in loans, a spouse who doesn’t love them and spends all their money, no relationship with their kids, too much time sending emails or speaking on the phone, no healthy relationship with themselves, deteriorating mental health and their body slowly breaking down.

Sure that person may be a millionaire on paper but are they successful?

Some people would say yes. I’m not so sure.

Success used to mean just dollar signs for me.

Now it’s become much more than that.

It’s striving to be happy and living a fulfilled life with people you love doing something that positively impacts the world.

That’s not a destination, but rather a continuous process because even if I reach some of the goals I’ve set out for myself, it doesn’t matter.

Goals give you purpose, which is important to have in life when most of the world is walking around like zombies unsure what they’re really doing every day.

But goals can’t be everything.

Goals can change. Priorities change. We change.

Goals also can’t all be externally motivated.

They have to come from within.

If you’re always chasing what someone wants for you, you’ll never live up to their expectation.

No one cares about you as much as you care about yourself because we’re all trapped in our minds worried about how other people perceive us rather than focusing on what makes us happy.

We allow other people’s judgments to affect how and why we act.

Don’t. 

Let them go.

You’ll never live up to someone else’s definition of success and you don’t have to. Don’t hold anyone else’s opinion of your life above your own. 

No one really knows what’s going on in the world and we’re all trying to figure it out as we go.

So focus on yourself. Define what success means to you and get after it. Doesn’t matter if it’s about money, relationships or experiences. Think about what you want out of life, write it down, say it to yourself every day, and go get it.

Success is in the eyes of the beholder, no one else.

Never forget that.