Lifescale

Chapter 10Liberate

Define Success on Your Trms

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”

– Steve Jobs

How do you define success? Is it by job title? Income?

Assets? Status?

I wrestled mightily with this question and wondered how I should measure success. A mentor long ago asked me, “If you had a choice, would you want to be rich or famous?” The young me quipped, “Why can't I have both?”

I now realize that she was guiding me to think beyond both, to my own definition of success. Being rich and famous are crude standards of success that society conditions us to believe will make us happy. She understood that chasing them, seeing them as the purpose of one's work, lures us away from true Happiness.

The understanding of success I learned as a child, which was reinforced throughout my growth into adulthood, was based on the goals and standards taught by my parents, grandparents, teachers, managers, and basically, all other authority figures in my life. It focused too much on a familiar formula:

• Go to church.
• Go to college.
• Work hard and make a good living.
• Make friends.
• Get married.
• Buy a house.
• Buy cars.
• Have children.
• Save money for a rainy day and for retirement.
• Be happy.

It's such a generic prescription, which is so ironic. Many of us are also taught, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” encouraged to believe we can achieve almost anything in life. So why has the list of things we should achieve been so preordained by all the generations ...