Some “successful” people seem to be optimizing their lives for “success” as if it was a quality of inherent goodness. Success is, in fact, a quality that is measured by standards other people set. You can’t simply claim that you are successful because you see yourself so. It can happen, but it’s gonna be pathetic. You have to make people decide whether you are successful or not. Being successful does not make sense without relying on people’s opinions. Whose opinion you rely on is something that only you can decide.

If you rely on your own opinion, then you will likely end up having delusions of grandeur or self-doubt. If you rely on society’s opinion, then you might end up living like a robot: going through a pre-defined life of typical, boring success. Both options are viable, but something in between ought to hit the sweet spot where you can find the right mix of satisfying internal opinions and external opinions (i.e., internal validation and external validation).

Looking at it this way, we might, after all, be trying to satisfy everybody’s definition of success—including ours, of course—to varying degrees that depend on complex social relationships. For example, satisfying your family is more important than satisfying a bunch of strangers you saw on the street who wants you to pay for their bus ticket home. The more attached you are to a group of people, the more you want to satisfy their standards of success and seek their validations. People who fall in love, for example, might do some crazy stuff just to seek the validation of their potential partners (i.e., crush) since they are very strongly attached to them.

Achieving success in the sense that one is living life correctly requires a healthy mix of validations from reliable sources. In fact, the older one gets, the smaller the list of external validations one needs. In the end, you will only care about yourself and your close family, so success, as others see it, wouldn’t mean shit to you. Your definition of success would be to live through your daily routine as accurately as possible without any interruptions or distractions.

There is this one famous study about happiness from Harvard that spanned nearly the whole life of the subjects. I noticed that many of them regretted not spending enough time in their youth with their families (especially their parents). I believe one reason why they regret it is because their definition of success, as in succeeding to live a good and happy life, has shifted with time and has become less concerned with materialistic achievements and number games. Success starts to become simpler, yet deeper and more complex in significance, more long-term, and more meaningful when looking at life wholistically. Still, meanings are subjective, and what success means to you might be completely different to another person. In fact, that other person might be you in the future. So, what does this deep, meaningful success can even be?

Consider people who live a short life, for example. Perhaps they won’t regret the fun they had and the non-responsible actions they took during their short lives (e.g. smoking and doing drugs, disrespecting people, not following the rules, bad relationship with family, etc.). It is true that they have, unfortunately, died young, which is actually an inevitable “failure” that some successful people always try to avoid by obsessing over a youthful lifestyle (e.g., Larry Ellison). Perhaps those people had died young for reasons beyond their control (e.g., war or accident). Therefore, we can safely say that they actually lived a fun, albeit short, life without bearing the consequences of worry and responsibility. Well, maybe you can paradoxically call it a successful life then! Unless they really preferred to live a longer life, it wouldn’t be a successful in their view, but they died, so they wouldn’t know.

If you knew you were gonna die young, what kind of successful life would you prefer? Would you seek fame and money? Would you commit crimes for your own satisfaction if you were to die tomorrow? Or would you cherish your last moments with the people you love most? What really makes you choose the path you take? And would your view of success change by knowing a little bit of the future and why?

People are (biologically) similar in the way they think, so they usually form similar opinions, but that doesn’t make the different opinions any less “correct”. I can convince myself that success is all about gaining more knowledge, and treat success in every context by that definition. Therefore, I would aim to gain more knowledge, disregarding money, happiness, and love, which are things that consitute other people’s whole lives. Nobody can prove me wrong; it’s just that my opinion is a radical one, and yours is a general one.

People are social creatures, they are not programmed to live alone. Words like “successful” and “famous” do not really make sense in non-social settings—at least when applied to people—so their meanings are deeply intertwined with they way society perceive those labels and use them. The meaning of success boils down to the way society views the idealistic individual, where society is a group of people living together and sharing resources (and thus, interact non-trivially by affecting each others’ welfare and forming one coherent system).

The collection of idealistic views held by the members of society together form the image of the average successful individual (with the whole group bias, of course). Radical or outlier views of success can possibly exist within subgroups of society as well. One can always take the image of success and try to achieve it to a larger extent, creating a competing culture around maximizing those qualities of success that can be projected into benchmark-able numbers (or, you know, KPIs). Again, this is only the average idea of success, which is the most typical by consensus, or majority. But can’t we define our own success and live by it? Well, yes, we can, but only a few would agree with us—it would be an inherently minority-based definition of success.

Our view of success depends on the society itself and how we project our collective definitions of success onto individuals, which is necessarily a compressed/statistic definition distilled from our available knowledge of the whole collection and how much importance we attribute to its constituents (i.e., a weighted average or median, if you will). There is nothing holding any society back from championing mass murderers and putting them at the pinnacle of the success pyramid, but that certainly does not reflect every single individual’s view of success in such a society. The ideals held by the individual dictate how they view success, but society’s projected view on the individual is highly dependent on the projection itself, which is why success is a relative quality (e.g., relative to my weighted average of a population of my choice). Even Count Dracula had exclaimed similar thoughts at Simon Richter’s face: “what is a [successful] man? A miserable little pile of [ideals].” True, a pile of ideals in some success rubric. Tick all these ideal boxes and you become successful.

Success is not a absolute quality of inherent goodness. What might be successful to you can be a failure to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Evil characters are successful at being the antagonists, right? Perhaps it helps to have a definition of what we precisely mean by success, since defining it as the extent to which we achieve a quality of subjective goodness can present ambiguities or possibly contradictions (e.g., a protagonist’s success is an antagonist’s failure and vice versa).

Let us look at some definitions of success from different dictionaries:

  • the accomplishment of an aim or purpose / the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors; the accomplishment of one’s goals / the achievement of something that you have been trying to do.
  • the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status / the achievement of a high position in a particular field, for example in business or politics.

These are slightly unsatisfactory definitions of success from a practical point of view. The success we have discussed so far pertains to both definitions, but touches on the first one more frequently, which is quite general and a bit self-centered. The other definition is what we often imply when we mention success as some general state we try to achieve. So, if I became the most famous, wealthiest, most respected person in the world, will I be successful? What if I was obnoxious and people respect me only because I’m famous and have money (e.g., Elon Musk)? What if I was famous for something disgusting or cringeworthy (e.g., Kim Kardashian)? What if I was all of that but unhappy? This definition of success does not take into account the deep, meaningful kind of success. Allow me to explain what I mean by deep success.

To be deeply successful is to live happily (convinced and content with your current state), self-sufficiently (have enough stability to maintain your current state), and actively (interact non-trivially with other’s states). You have to be, overall, convinced that your life is good. I mean, it might seem exaggerated in simplicity, but it is not. Think about it. It’s true that money is power (and France is Bacon); it buys pleasure and influence, which brings fame and respect—or just external validity. When you look at it wholistically, it’s mainly about feeling fulfilled, feeling valid, while having the resources to maintain that, which becomes cynical loop of sadness for those who rely on money to feel valid but don’t have enough of it. But this feeling of self-fulfillment and validation is totally in our heads and mostly under our control (within the limits of our psychological nature). What ultimately remains is our own long-term progress in life and how content we are with it. In particular, our long-term relationships with our family and friends is a major part of this, as well as the experiences we had and knowledge we gained in life. The three conditions above ensure that one can be happy and stay happy. The biggest challenge in my opinion is to convince yourself that you are currently living happily, which one could argue is sometimes near impossible, but the topic of happiness itself is subject to different interpretations and realizations that are hard to capture under one framework. In general, the happiness I’m talking about is the “inner peace” kind of happiness, or the realization that one’s life has a valid meaning in this universe, which I personally find to be of the most profound and powerful kind even in the face of the most adversarial circumstances.

Overall, if your path in life is a happy path, and the people you care about can validate that, and perhaps most importantly, that you are convinced and content with your life, then I think you pretty much succeeded in life. The Internet generations experience enormous amounts of stress and anxiety in their social lives because they evaluate and validate their own happiness based on an extremely large pool of not-so-positive opinions and ideologies. Thus, they are under constant pressure to achieve an unrealistic form of success. They key is to be convinced that your life is happy, or otherwise, to work towards a reasonable goal and be content with as little as possible. There is nothing wrong with not being the best or not doing or seeing everything, and I understand very well the feeling of disappointment that comes from realizing that the fire of your curiosity may never be quenched (which sucks ass), but internal validity can never be solved from the outside; it starts from yourself. Our curiosities can lead us to the stars of success or to the depths of misery, irrespective of our original intent. My advice, which is also aimed at myself, for achieving deep success is:

Try to be happy with yourself and live a meaningful life. That should be enough.

You can find more inner peace when you realize that the materialistic kind of success depends a lot on luck. Think about what you can’t change: you can’t change your parents, your country of birth, time of birth, your genetics, your childhood, and myriads of other things. You can’t avoid your fate, so accept the flow of life. Or as Void puts it succinctly: “Everything is within the flows of Causality”. Just live, be thankful, and say: Alhamdulilah. That’s deep success.

[Last edit: August 18th, 2026.]