What is success?
You might be reading this article and thinking: ‘Wow, this person is so successful — she has published an article on Medium!’, or you might be thinking: ‘Come on, this person must have failed in other areas of life so she is looking for comfort by writing about the worn out topic that everyone’s ears are full of.’ The truth is neither-nor. The fact that I am writing this is neither an indicator of my success or failure, it is just a current need of my existence, a cross-section of my life path and a necessary step to do between yesterday and tomorrow. Making it timeless and universally applicable to some kind of scale of all the elements in my life is fallacious. The methodology is dubious, and the approach completely inappropriate. We have been treating the word ‘success’ in a completely erroneous manner, and applying it to the wrong set of variables.
We are all aware, in this globalized world, of the differences that cultures have in their values and ambitions to achieve this vague state of success. Whereas in some parts of the world your community labels you successful when you accumulate wealth, the others will think you are successful if you marry into a good (and wealthy) family. People in certain parts of India are oriented towards earning a good salary, or becoming a doctor, while in the others it is the distribution of wealth that is considered successful, as well as the spiritual enlightenment. It is not important what you carry in your bag, but the fact that you do not even need the bag to live is the achievement in itself!
Even within a community, or the same family, there are different criteria of measuring success. My lifelong childhood friend who has been my classmate, best friend, and a brother substitute, founded a company as he graduated in the UK. He was enthusiastic about it, and was passionate about seeing the company grow. At one point he sold his ownership share but he still works for the company. He was able to buy two flats in two European capitals, but his workload is even heavier than before. He envies me for having a 15-hour work week, and he considers me much more successful, because I have a lot of freedom to choose what to do with my free time. He is bound by a certain family situation which does not allow him to trim down those hours which would in consequence lower his income. On the other side of the same success scale, I see my cousin who reminds me every once in a while how he is more successful than I am. He usually starts by comparing our salaries, and then the countries we both live: he lives in Switzerland, and I live in Morocco, and you can already guess that his salary is way higher than mine. The next measuring tool he uses is the fact that he only finished high-school (barely) in a small town and was not an excellent student like me, and he was struggling greatly with earnings, living in a small village in the country, until he found a job in Germany, prior to coming to Switzerland. He often wonders how come I failed, being so smart and educated, and he succeeded, against all odds. I cannot even begin to explain to him, or people like him, why I will never consider myself a failure — or success.
I will not give examples from my childhood or teenage years, because they were, as a whole, a long period of continued success, in traditional sense. When I was 29, I got a ‘dream job’ and started working in an embassy. The salary was great, the country was the one I had chosen (not the first choice according to my cousin, though), I didn’t even work hard, the benefits were great, but — I was slowly becoming dissatisfied. It took me a long time to figure why, and the enthusiasm of the success wore off towards the end of my mandate. I chose to work for a private company, but the s*** hit the fan, and the country transformed in a war zone. When this situation subsided, I thought it was a great success that I managed to find a job within weeks after the peace was announced. Fast forward two years, and my success was quitting the same job, because I had not received from it what I had anticipated. The success euphoria took over my life, and I realized I did not have much solid income so had to get by with part-time work. And this period explained what I had not understood years earlier. My success was not in the kind of job, or the salary I would be getting, but the freedom to say ‘I don’t feel like going anywhere today’, and not being punished for it! Or choosing to work 12 hours a day, and being rewarded for it. So, I started a company with some friends, and we were quite successful, until another s*** hit the fan, and I decided it was time to leave. And I succeeded in that, too!
Nowadays, I consider myself successful when I manage to give my cat her daily dose of medications. I consider myself successful because I enjoy going to work by bicycle in all months of the year! And above all, my success is having stayed alive and unharmed through all that turmoil. I work mostly with children, so my workdays are quite demanding but at the same time rewarding. I also have a very pleasant work atmosphere, the colleagues and the boss who respect my contributions and my somewhat unusual ideas and points of view. My success today is having eaten the delicious local goat cheese, with fresh locally grown vegetables and knowing that I will be doing some online courses. My success yesterday was the fact that I managed to create and upload my mantra chanting to Soundcloud. It took about two hours to upload, but I succeeded!
My success today is different from success yesterday, and will be even more different from the one tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will consider myself successful if I do some housework and if I manage to complete reading a paper related to my online course.
The fluctuations on your life path do not allow you to measure it with the same ruler over different time periods. The wider the time-frame that you are applying the same success-criteria, the less successful your life will seem. Success is inevitably tied to the time dimension, and whatever you consider a success a few years ago may not apply today. The goals change, the targets we aim for become smaller or bigger. The success is not the size of the target, or the distance between you and the target, it is the fact that you see it, aim, shoot, and hit. If you hit many targets, your inner sense of success will be much more gratified than when continuously shooting for one and the same giant target that seems so far away, that you could not even shoot it with a bazooka.
