Success is What You Mean It To Be

Fear of failure is no longer a thing for me

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

— Henry David Thoreau

I find it almost impossible to go through a single day without encountering the word success.

Why has it become such a buzzword? Why do we need to care so much about becoming successful?

It is becoming a bit tiring.

The world refers to success as a destination, a height we can reach to preside over others, or a point of life at which we transition to someone with money, status, and fame.

For many, this may sound like a fabulous thing to strive for or even kill themselves to achieve, if necessary.

There seems to be the notion that our lives won’t amount to much until we make it there and become successful.

Oh, right! Now I laugh at this notion.

Okay, maybe, I am being simplistic. I believe there are other more nuanced, refined, and healthier versions of success floating out there in the collective mindpool.

The point is that any version of success that is not yours isn’t for you. It’s a losing battle to try to conform to someone else’s perception of success. I stand by this wholeheartedly.

The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.

— John D. Rockefeller Jr.

For thousands of years, wise people have encouraged us to think for ourselves and question collective beliefs, including those about success.

Here comes our superpower:

We get to decide what anything means for us. We get to make the last calls for ourselves.We get to choose our own versions of success.

Of course, doing so isn’t easy in this noisy world. When we don’t feel successful, it is more likely that we’ve failed to define success for ourselves. This is okay so long as we learn from this failure and sober up without losing too much time.

One skill I’ve developed in the past few years is learning to derive a sense of success from small and ordinary things.

For example, I feel successful if I get through my day without snapping or yelling at my loved ones. I used to be pessimistic, jumpy, and hot-tempered. My poor husband has gone through a lot. Now I hardly ever get frazzled. I find myself to be stubbornly and perhaps delusionally optimistic just because I choose to be.

Some things that make me feel successful include:

• making steady progress on meaningful projects and skills
• not forgetting to nurture my relationships
• getting through my day without losing hope and appreciation for life.

Looking back, much of my insecurity stemmed from a misguided notion of success. It has taken me years of meditation and daily contemplation to stop feeling like a failure. Once I tasted the most delicious feeling of letting myself be, successful or not, there was no going back to my old ways of thinking.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

— Albert Schweitzer

We’ve all seen many so-called successful people who remain unhappy, unkind, and unfulfilled. They may be successful in a worldly sense, yet they’ve failed themselves. They’ve shown us that something other than success matters more.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not jealous or dismissive of successful people. Many are genuinely happy and use their success to help others, improve conditions of the world, or simply enjoy their lives. This can happen when we do what we care about and love.

Raj Raghunathan, the author of If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?, wrote,

“When you don’t need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you’re good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you’re going to progress towards mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.”

I’ve learned not to waste precious time and energy coveting that elusive destination others call success. Why do it when I can derive a sense of success right now, doing things I care about?

If success is what we make of it and what we mean it to be, it is always within our reach. Always.

From this perspective, fear of failure ceases to be a thing.