What does success look like?

Small scale? Achieving a desired result. I successfully drove to work today.

Grand scale? Happiness. In the grand scale we're never really done so meeting an end goal is not the definition of success. Being happy during the journey is about the best thing that we can ever hope for.

And now to quote one of the most successful people I've ever seen, "life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it."

success, in the general way that its being used here, is contextual. it begins with a specific point of reference and considers progress from that point onward.
"success" if you were born in a slum in India is not measured the same as if you were born in the royal palace. people in relatively wealthy nations have very different measurements than people in abject poverty. also we can imagine that people in "primitive" societies, say amazon tribes or something, will have variations on these themes that are relative to their social structures.

*success is an ongoing process of facing challenges and living up to ones potential. in that sense, there is no final destination and its been said that the MOST successful people are the ones who are always facign forward. looking at the next challenge or opportunity.
i cant know your point of reference, so i will mention some of the things that i know are very common. you can do whatever you want, but theres a very high likelihood that these things WILL end up being important to you eventually, if they arent already.

MONEY
youre a slave to money until you make enough of it to not be a slave anymore. you can say that the endless need to make more and more money is the same thing as slavery to money (which isnt really true) but thats not what im talking about - people who work two dead end, part time jobs, because they cant get anything better and are on the razors edge of homelessness are slaves to money. people who own seven houses and broker million dollar deals over lunch are not slaves to money with an endless need to fill, theyre doing it because they CAN and they WANT TO.
the exact amount of money that you need to be happy is a shifting variable; basically it is "enough to be comfortable" which depends on where you live and how big your household is. enough to raise a family, be able to cover medical emergencies, and maybe even have a have a few moderately expensive luxuries, tends ot be the answer. making more money AFTER youve reached that point doesnt much increase happiness but having LESS than that does decrease happiness.

SEX AND ROMANCE
99.999% of all people want to have a romantic and sexual partner, and for most of us we would like that partner to be someone we like and are actually attracted to. (ok, i made that number up, it might not be 99.999 but its a damn high number and youre almost certainly one of them.)

i want to get the message across especially to young men that if you want to have a quality woman then youll need to be a quality man. it really helps if you dont screw off your youth on booze and video games

TO BE CONNECTED AND FEEL USEFUL
human beings are social creatures and we pretty much all need some level of intimacy. i know that a lot of us are rather prone to isolation for all number of reasons. i am myself. but its very important to our mental health to have at least a few people who we are close to in multiple realms. obviously we tend to want to have romantic partners for intimacy needs but most of us need more than any one person can give, so we have to have other poeple in our lives so that we dont smother our partners. the "ideal" is to have one or two true friends; real friends who we trust and can count on in times of crisis and who could trust and count on us also. not always easy to make these kinds of friends but its important to try. and to have at least some mutually respectful relations (as in, there is genuine respect) with co-workers or neighbors or enthusiasts of some activity . some poeple are social butterflies and tend to accumulate relationships, others of us keep to ourselves for the most part and actually have to force ourselves to reach out. ITS WORTH IT TO REACH OUT.
whether it is through work or volunteering or mentoring or whatever, people have a deep desire to be significant somehow. we dont all measure significance the same way, and if youre not sure what it means to you then a good rule of thumb to begin with is that youll probably never regret making peoples lives better in some way.

TO FEEL COMPETENT
its easier to accept our shortcomings when we can point to something that we are genuinely good at and say "well im flawed in this area but im strong in__". this is a short explanation but its on the list because it matters a lot to most people: develop genuine skill in some arena, it will make you feel better about yourself. another dimension of competence is in regards to relationships: being good at relationships is a skill and it not only makes us more "attractive" to others (not just in a romantic way, but generally) but it also gives us a sense of personal validity

HAVE A PASSION
you could just as well call this a hobby lol its nice when peoples competence and their hobbies coincide but it doesnt always happen that way. anyhow, it helps us to have some activity that we can dedicate ourselves to over time and which allows us to channel our creativity, sense of beauty, or just general enthusiasm.
at one time i thought being good at video games would fill this need but it turned out that, for me at least, it doesnt. for me personally, playing video games ended up being pretty useless. maybe its because i wasnt keeping myself on the pulse of the industry; games and even systems get old fast, and i didnt keep up.i wasnt really present in any gamer communities and i didnt participate in tournaments-- other people do these things and love games so YMMV on that particular activity. the point is that people feel better about their lives when they can spend some part of it doing something simply because they enjoy it.

HAVE A FAMILY
i understand its out of fashion to want to have a family. i dont want to be insulting so all i will say is that it is academics pushing their political ideologies who have impresses upon the collective the idea that family isnt really that important, and evolution does not care about political ideologies. it is important to have families and the majority of people come to this realization eventually in the course of their lives. sometimes they get there right at the end of their biological window for doing it and then they are in panic mode.
many of us are afraid of family, all i can say to that is
1) go back to the first item on this list, and
2) understand that building strong relationships is a skill set that we can all develop to some degree. "all" includes YOU!

It should look like this , and taste like chocolate too , otherwise its not succes

Using bold for quotes, because the quote thing is started to bug me...

it's not always about money. and yet.. getting paid to do it.

So it's a little bit about money?

Ob1's Bit

You're just a hop skip and a jump away from Maslow's there...

In any case, it's amazing how well Money can fill in for the other five....


Despite my apparent direction here, I'm trying to make some kind of point that everyone wants to believe their success/happiness is not connected to their material resources...but then sort of gets a bit vague as to whether they would embrace a life without those resources.

I'm going to use Senan for an example...He could very well be content with having cancer, but has decided that it's actually a crap option, and having boatloads of cash (or access to boatloads of cash through insurance policies, workcover, or whatever) gives him the option to fight for another path that is less cancery.


I could have less money, but I'm not going to pretend for a moment that I'd want to, or that my success is not in many ways bound to my wealth.

Walking down the main st of my town, tunelessly whistling "Que Sera" would be a lot less enjoyable if I didn't have comfortable shoes, a nice shirt, and a fresh hand made cappuccino from the local overpriced cafe in my hand....


Okay, well I wanted to try to sell a story about separating the feeling of success from Money, as a sort of humble jedi inner peace thing....but mostly I just said that money is great and makes everything better.


So much for that.

For me, it is to be confident in what you do to your satisfaction and meet the needs at hand. In others, to see someone who does what they do and do it confidently and well.

I'm a single father...

I'm raising an amazing daughter on my own.

I have moved to England from the United States, changed my way of life, and began a currently on-going career that teaches music to kids and gives them an opportunity to develop confidence in themselves, something that I find very relevant and personal meaning in. There are future plans and opportunities in front of me with open doors.

I have some of the most incredible and caring friends that anybody could really have.

Every day I find myself learning so many personal things that I can't even find the time nor the most proper way to really write a lot of it down (eventually I'll learn how to do that too).

Even my bad days are a success, for how I grow through it.

Having existed at all ...

...having "mattered" to someone for a few hours ...

... and not having been done in yet.

OB1Shinobi wrote: people who work two dead end, part time jobs, because they cant get anything better and are on the razors edge of homelessness are slaves to money. people who own seven houses and broker million dollar deals over lunch are not slaves to money with an endless need to fill, theyre doing it because they CAN and they WANT TO.

Moving from exhibit A in that sentence to exhibit B is my idea of success.