We all want to be successful in life. What does success mean to us? Because success is goal in life, when it is not achieved, we get disappointed. We are then, to be blunt, unsuccessful. But the word success can hold anything within. So if you we don’t know what success is, disappointment is inevitable. We really do need to define it.
Let’s go through a few common definitions of success and see if we can draw any conclusions from it. By the end of this series of posts, I hope to give you a good definition that will make you successful in life. What more can you ask of a blog?
We life in a material world, and the most popular definition of success is in terms of the things you own, or your ability to own them, which basically translates to money. So we use money as a proxy to success, which is why questions like, “If you are so smart, how come you are poor?” make sense. Being smart by itself, or acquiring knowledge for its own sake does not success make. However, this definition of success has problems. For one thing, money is the kind of thing you can keep accumulating, which means you can be more and more successful until you become the richest person on earth. Secondly, by this definition of success, someone like Mother Theresa would have to be disappointed with her life. And someone like Madoff would be considered to have lived a good life (if he hadn’t been caught, that is). In other words, the intrinsic goodness (a concept again hard to define) takes a backseat to pure accumulation of the green stuff. This phenomenon and the associated excesses, of course, are something we do see everywhere in the world around us.
We are not going to address the ethical question about money being the definition of success. We just need to understand that it leads to unachievable goals to almost everyone. By this money-based definition of success, almost everyone ends up being unsuccessful and disappointed with the way their life has turned out, because they always feel that they could have earned more, which of course they could have.
One way of avoiding disappointment is to set a ceiling, a limit to how much you want to accumulate. Let’s say you set a “modest” limit of one million dollars on your monetary goal. Given that it is only three or four percent of those in a rich country like Singapore that make the cut, it is a fairly respectable, yet achievable, goal for most of the readers of this blog. Now the trouble with this redefinition is that it ends up becoming a moving target. By the time you reach anywhere near the target, your lifestyle would have changed so as to make it look too modest. But if you can stick with it, a capped financial target seems like sensible definition of success.