Success, Failure and the Grey Areas In Between

For as long as I can remember, I have felt immense pressure to succeed, to be successful, to be a success. And although I never really knew exactly how to do so, I gave it my best. Throughout my childhood, when life was simple and Dads are impressed by things like learning to write your name in cursive writing and getting perfect on spelling tests, success seemed to be tangible. I felt as though if I just kept doing whatever it was I was doing to make my Daddy smile, I would be on the road to a successful life.

Unfortunately, life has a way of becoming complicated on you. My Daddy still smiles at me, but here I am, at nearly 28 and I still couldn’t tell you what I believe success to be. I suppose this is my attempt to do so.  

As I often do, I turned to the internet for answers to my questions. What does the world define as success? I wanted to know. 


Ironically, the one source I can almost always trust to clarify the meaning of any obscure word, the dictionary, gave me less certainty about the true meaning of success than when I had begun my search. It had only been five minutes and already I felt as though I had taken on an issue I couldn't hope to understand.

                suc·cess/səkˈses/

Noun:

The accomplishment of an aim or purpose. The attainment of popularity or profit.

Perhaps I am a simple layman, but it seems to me that the word success has two very different meanings. How does one interpret this? Is success subjective – relative to the opinions of those who are judging you? Like beauty, is success in the eye of the beholder?

Rather than finding answers, a myriad of questions were flooding my mind.

In the interest of preserving my sanity, I set about analyzing this confounding definition on a more granular level.

For me, success has a very positive connotation to it. My imagination drifts to chubby cheeked highschool students embarking on their journey out of highschool on their graduation day, the expression of sheer agony mixed with pure pleasure as a marathon runner crosses the finish line, the feeling I had when I received my first real job offer after college. All of these thoughts coexist happily within the defined realms of accomplishing an aim or a purpose.

But what of those goals and aims that are negative? If you attain the goal of suicide, does that make you a success? How about if you achieve your goal of starving yourself until you are just a shade of a human being? Is that successful? Murderers, rapists, liars and thieves – all of these people achieve their goals but would society define them as successes? I would like to think not.

So, perhaps this broad definition is required. Maybe success is achieving your goals, but only if they culminate in becoming rich, famous or popular.

By these standards I hardly make the cut. I am not rich, last time I checked I wasn’t famous, and the jury is still out on my overall popularity.

It is at this point, to my dismay that my eyes scrolled down the page to read the antonym for success – failure. The words practically beam off the page at me, judging me for my lack of successful qualities.

My chances of achieving success were starting to look quite dim at this point, and feeling discouraged, I retired to a cup of tea to spend some time absorbing my realization of my utter failure in life.

Upon further consideration, I came to the pleasant conclusion that my old friend, the dictionary was wrong. I am not a failure; I’m just not rich, famous or popular.

As far as I am concerned, these requirements are too rigid. If the case were that success was achieved only by the rich famous and popular, well then that makes the rest of us big old failures. I was beginning to feel a little better about myself. This was swiftly followed by the nagging awareness that I was no closer to understanding what exactly success was.

I closed my eyes and asked myself to produce the first word that came to mind associated with success. Time and time again, my brain responded with the word ‘Happiness.’ Not, money, or fame.

Maybe I lack ambition.

Or maybe the only way I truly believe I will achieve happiness is by being successful. Regardless, my little exercise was not helping much.

For something that you either are, or you aren’t, success seems to be torturously intangible, almost to the point of being laughable. Why is it that the definition seems so clear cut and yet I am left with the feeling that something very important has been left out?

After what seemed like hours of quietly pondering (which in actuality was probably more like 30 min), from somewhere deep inside me, the answer came.

Success is measured by the soul, not by prosperity, or how many people attend your funeral. No one can judge you to be a success or a failure except yourself.

The dictionary is correct in some semblance of its explanation, but it leaves out an important aspect of what I believe to be success – fulfillment. It may mean acquiring mass amounts of wealth to one person, or being recognized by strangers to another, or perhaps renowned by peers and colleagues by someone else. For yet others, success means simply to plant a vegetable garden and reap its harvest. The underlying variable that remains the same is this – you smile in your soul. Something inside you says, “Good job, you! You have done it! I approve of you.”

Is this a vague explanation? In short, yes. And after some review, I am inclined to say my explanation looks a lot like the dictionary’s “The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”

I submit this minor alteration for your review.

suc·cess/səkˈses/

Noun:

The accomplishment of an aim or purpose that brings an individual genuine happiness and fulfillment.

One might ask then, after all this reflection on the subject, do I consider myself successful? I wish the answer came easily. I may not have accomplished everything in my life to make myself genuinely happy and fulfilled yet, but each day I am a little closer than the last. I think a better question would be, do I consider myself a failure? 

Something inside me says I’m not. J