Success is probably one of the most used English words in books, articles, talks etc. By the time an average person finishes high school, he or she has already started thinking of success and how to become successful; what career paths to take, what skills to learn. In fact, religious institutions today have been a place where people are drilled on success; many of the sermons delivered in churches revolve around success.
Is anything wrong with success? Absolutely nothing is wrong with success or desiring to succeed at something. To succeed at something means to accomplish what was intended. If I intend to read two books this month, success will mean that I have completed the books. Thus, success is about achieving. When it comes to life, when a person says I want to be successful, the question is, what results or goals did they intend to accomplish? And are these goals set by him, consciously, from a place of awareness, having considered his values?
Society conditions us to desire success and set benchmarks for success. We personalize these standards, and we even convince ourselves that we consciously choose these yardsticks. But do we? Right from primary school, the Education system programmed us to measure our worth by numbers, our scores in tests and exams, and we’re trained to base our sense of worth on our position in class. Those who do well on the test are seen as special, and those who are at the bottom of the test are not. This may appear to have little impact on how our sense of self is developed and how we define success as adults, but it does not. Our belief about life is most formed during childhood, before we are done with high school, we have accumulated enough information and experience to form our definition of success and what constitutes a good life.
In school, you will probably be happy with yourself if you scored 40 out of 100 in a math exam and the rest of your mates scored less than 40. The reason is that we have been taught to measure ourselves against our mates. If you are the smartest kid among some average kids, you are happy with yourself; if you are at the bottom, you are likely to feel like a failure. What happens is that we carry this distorted view of life into adulthood. We become adults whose sense of self is predicated on numbers, status, and recognition. We compare ourselves with our mates. If you ask the average person to describe what a successful life looks like for them, they are most likely going to include things such as income, status, Job title, properties (cars, house, etc.). How did we come to this narrow definition of success? Part of the answer is our education system and a hyper-consumer-based society. School tells us to measure our worth by comparing ourselves with our mates, and the hyper-consumer-based society tells us that we can buy our way to success and happiness, that success is having more material goods than our mates. So, what happens is that when we set out to build a successful life, many of us carry a distorted, narrowed, and unhealthy view of success. Borrowing the phrase from Eric Ries, we are using a vanity metric to measure success. What happens is that we are constantly in pursuit, because success is elusive in how we define it. The ability to live life using our own standards and metrics of success, formed from our values, interests, and soul longings, has been suppressed by society. Is it any wonder that despite all the consumer goods in our world today, depression and suicide rates are on the increase?
This is not just an individual thing; it is a national problem. As a nation, we are largely focused on numbers; we talk about our GDP, Taxes, etc., but we rarely talk about National well-being. We talk about progress in terms of numbers, how well the economy is doing, even though the mass of working-class people who are driving the economy are healthier.
If the way we view success is distorted and doesn’t lead to success, we really seek, then we need to redefine success, then we need to redefine success for ourselves. This simply means setting the metrics for what success is for you, not for your friends, colleagues, or classmates, and also ensuring that those metrics are not vanity metrics. Vanity metrics: income, possessions, titles, are not inherently bad. The problem is that they don’t capture what truly makes life meaningful. They keep us in constant pursuit because the finish line keeps shifting. There will always be someone richer, more accomplished, or more admired. Redefining success for us doesn’t mean rejecting goals or ambitions all together. It means choosing metrics that align with our deepest values, rather than society’s shallow benchmarks. It means asking yourself these questions and answering them honestly:
- Am I living in alignment with my values
- Do my daily choices give me freedom and autonomy?
- Am I cultivating authenticity and staying true to myself?
- Am I building nourishing relationships?
These are not vanity metrics; they are the real prerequisite for a fulfilled life. They cannot be bought or compared; they can only be lived.
Redefining success is an act of courage. It means resisting the noise of comparison, stepping out of the race for more, and choosing a life aligned with what truly matters. It means success is no longer about what society applauds, but about what your soul affirms.
In the end, a successful and satisfied life is not about being “the best ” in comparison to others. It’s about being true to yourself, living a life of meaning, and measuring your worth not by vanity metrics but by values that endures.