On Defining Success

Who gets to define what success is for your life?

In a post entitled, Defining Success, Dan Pedersen asks,

Is success defined by you or is it defined by other people? If it’s defined by other people, what wisdom do they have that you don’t?

While these questions are not new, after reading this post, I found myself thinking about them more deeply than I had before. I think this is likely something universal that we all struggle with at some time.

Different people may struggle more with it, others less, but at some point, we all re-examine them and either decide we are okay with the way they are or that they don’t fit us as well as they once seemed to. There are implications for both sides of this coin.

Obviously, our initial ideas of success have to come from somewhere, meaning they are defined for us from a very young age. As children, we are taught the values of our parents and our community. This includes what it means to be considered successful.

For some, this definition may include wealth, position, recognition, marriage and children or educational achievement. Usually, along with ideas about what it means to be successful are ideas about what success isn’t. And this may include the same factors listed above depending on the family and community.

For example, while I was expected to do well in school, college was never thought to be a “must” for girls in my family. College was viewed as simply a place for me to earn my Mrs.

When I failed at that and announced I planned to go to graduate school it was automatically assumed this meant med or law school, since that was where I might meet a future doctor or lawyer. I was never supposed to actually get the degree, just the husband.

When I stated that I intended to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, in particular, clinical child/pediatric psychology, my parents were not happy and did everything they could at first to talk me out it. After all, psychologists were mostly female weren’t they? How would I possibly meet a husband in that kind of a program?

What had happened to put me at odds with my family’s definitions of success, at the insistence that my perspective had to be the same as theirs?

I had somehow come to the decision that I couldn’t define success exclusively by whatever my parents said it was. Furthermore, I decided I had the right to determine what my own goals were and how I would achieve them.

And as I achieved each new goal, I added additional ones, such that my definition of success was never static, but always growing to encompass new things, new ideas about who I was. I came to understand that success is something that is dynamic, developing and sometimes changing as we better define what’s important to us.

And I think I arrived at the ultimate definition of success when I realized this last truth. Our conceptualization of who we are, our self-image, is largely defined by this idea of success.

But while many want to define success in terms of some endpoint that we reach when we can call ourselves successful, it is a larger and much more personal reality. Success isn’t the same thing for everyone, and just like no two people are exactly alike, no two visions of success are exactly the same either.

I decided to create a list of some of the different things success means to me. I’m closer to reaching some of these goals than others, but I’m still working on all of them on some level.

As I composed this list, other definitions formed which I jotted down in my journal to explore more fully. For the time being, these are some of the definitions of success I came up with based on where I currently am in my life.

• Success is having somewhere you feel accepted for who you are and where you have a sense of homecoming whenever you return
• Success is adapting to the challenges and changes in life and altering your goals accordingly.
• Success is knowing when you have made mistakes and finding ways to prevent yourself from making the same mistakes again.
• Success is knowing the difference between something you need and something you want and prioritizing these two categories accordingly. Success is learning to obtain what you need with enough internal and material resources left over to get at least some of what you also want.
• Success is learning to balance work, hobbies, passions, and relationships without becoming overwhelmed or attending to just one of these to the detriment of the others.
• Success is knowing how to take time for yourself and when to put your needs first without feeling guilty.
• Success is the ability to accept constructive feedback to improve in some way while not taking useless or purposefully hurtful criticism to heart.
• Success is being able to see the positive in everything and remaining optimistic even in the face of adversity.
• Success is accepting that anxiety is part of life and despite it being uncomfortable sometimes doing what makes you anxious anyway.
• Success is learning something new every day.
• Success is the ability to impart what you know a lot about or do well in a way that enables others to do so also.
• Success is knowing when to give in, when to compromise and when to stand your ground.

I think the most important definition I came up with is that success is when you understand that your destiny is controlled by you.

You make the decisions on how much control to give others, what actions you will take to achieve your goals, when you need to help along the way and how you go about obtaining it.

Learn to take the reigns of your life so that you can guide it in the direction of your choosing. Enjoy the journey even as you focus on the long-awaited outcome.

Please share some of the ways you define success in the comments below.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found here on Amazon.

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