What success means to you?

I have the impression that nowadays all the people want to be successful. But what does it mean to be successful in the modern world? Is success the same thing as happiness or not really? After writing the post of perfectionism I rather doubt that we can put the equal sign between those two things.  

Also, few weeks ago, I listened a TED Radio Hour entirely dedicated to defining success and here is what the speakers are saying.  

The video starts with Tony Robbins who likes to call himself “a why guy” because he always asks people why are they doing what they are doing. In his speech, he observes that we rarely consider ourselves successful, and when it comes to a question “why” practically all of us refer to the resources as the cause of failure. We constantly mention the lack of time, the lack of money or technology, but, in his opinion (which I share), the resource is not a defining factor when it comes to success. Is the emotion which turns our desires into action and even if we cannot control many things in our lives, we can control our thinking. It sounds like a cliché, I know, but it became a cliché because there is a deep truth in this. If we could expect less and be happier about with what we have in the present moment, life would be easier.   

The next speaker is psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth which refers to a “grit” as a significant predictor of success. Angela is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and she studied the objective indicators of success to figure out why some people are more successful than others because, as she had noticed, IQ was not the only difference about her best and worst students. From her research we know that the characteristic that emerged was grit - the predisposition to presume very long-term goals with passion and perseverance. She claims that to be successful we should live our lives like if it was a marathon, not a sprint. 

The next speaker is Mike Rowe, the presenter of the TV program Dirty Jobs and ex-opera singer. As a soloist he didn’t considered himself as a happy and successful person and from that came the idea of Dirty jobs. He redefines the measure of success – because nowadays for too many people the success is what you do. He claims that people from dirty jobs are happier than you think they also have an amazing kind of symmetry in their life. We can hardly imagine that there is something wrong with a statement “follow your passions” but Mike tries to convince us that instead of it we should bring the passion always with you. In his opinion we really need a PR campaign for labor. 

The last speaker in some way continues Mike’s way of thinking – a philosopher Alain de Botton claims that the modern society live in a permanent status of anxiety caused by the possibility of failure. Especially in the United States we have a strong statement that you can be whoever you want because we are all equal but what happens if this land of opportunity doesn’t go right for you? You are a looser. And that is not true. To be successful we need to recognize that the pression is enormous and start to treat ourselves with compassion because succeed in one area will probably mean neglecting others. So, before you start trying to be successful you need to tide up the definition of what success means to you because you can’t have it all.