What is success? There are certain questions that I consider important to think about - but whenever I try to, I end up going in circles and questioning everything. This question is a perfect example. Before trying to answer it directly, it would probably be useful to start off by listing what success is not.

Success is not:

  • Excessive money or material luxuries. The happiness that something I bought might give me is pretty temporary. If I truly end up believing that my happiness is tied to non-essential items I’ve bought, my desire for them will never end. The goalpost for riches will never stop moving.
  • Approval or admiration from others. Boy, this was a hard one to internalize. I think it’s good to care about the opinions of a few people around you of your choosing, but not necessarily society at large. In general, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to base your idea of success on something you have so little control over.
  • Physical beauty. This is another one for which the goalpost never stops moving if you begin to take it too seriously. Also, in a world where body types and facial features go in and out of style based on the whims of social media, whether or not the world at large finds you beautiful is also something you have virtually no control over.
  • Someone else’s idea of success, like a friend, a family member or a parent. I’m pretty sure we all need our own definition of success, and my definition could be very different from yours.

Now that I’ve covered what I’m fairly sure success is not, I’ll try to walk through the options for what success could be. In fact, I’ll try to lead you through my thought process when I ask myself this question.

Firstly, I think: Success means happiness.

If I am broadly happy and have several moments of joy throughout every day, I’ll consider myself successful. This is sort of an answer from first principles, since I consider everyone’s life to be just pursuit of happiness. Happiness is a term I’m using to convey a lot of different things - joy, contentment, inner peace, etc.

However, if I look a little bit closer, this sort of falls apart. I mean, I consider myself a broadly happy person already. I’m very lucky to be able to say that, of course. There are so many people in my age group who face enormous obstacles to happiness that I’ve never had to deal with. Happiness is hard. And overall, I think I have a good life. I look forward to most days and I like waking up in the morning. I have several moments every day wherein I experience joy in a very mindful, present way. Most importantly, I have no overarching stresses. Most of the stress I experience has a limited time duration.

So am I successful already?

I don’t think so, because I feel like I have a lot of work to do - I have desires. I want to achieve certain things professionally. I want to travel. I want a family of my own. I want a vinyl record collection and I want to play it when I cook in my big sunny kitchen. Oh, and I want to learn how to cook. I feel like there’s a lot of joy that I have yet to experience.

So then, is success then the absence of desire? Happiness is supposed to be tied to the absence of desire, and I just conflated success with happiness.

But I’m happy now, and I still don’t think I’m successful.

More importantly, I feel as though I’m happy even with the acknowledgement of my desires. I guess my desires do cause moments of sadness, but my life doesn’t feel characterized by that sadness.

Usually after all of this, I end up realizing that I don’t really know what success is yet. I think happiness is a basic prerequisite to success, obviously. But for me, it might not be the only ingredient. When I hear people commenting about a person’s success, I don’t really know what that means. I know what it means to be successfully professionally. Maybe if you have a good family life or a support system, you’re experiencing success in your relationships. If you ran 26.2 miles, you’re successful at running a marathon. But broad definitions of a success in life confuse me. I don’t think it’s as simple as people make it out to be. It’s even more confusing when people use things that success is clearly not (material goods, beauty, approval of society, etc.) to try and frame someone else’s life as successful.

Anyways, I’m not too sure if this post has a conclusion. I watched a clip of Naval Ravikant on the Joe Rogan podcast a couple years ago and Rogan asked him what he thought the meaning of life was (which in my mind is a parallel question to the definition of success). Naval said he didn’t know for sure, but there is one thing he did know - Everyone’s answer has to be different, and exploring the question is far more meaningful and useful than the existence of, or the arrival upon, a definite answer.

So there you go. I guess we’ll just keep exploring the question.