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 (one’s validation of oneself) and external opinions (others’ validation of oneself).

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 “success” and “fame” do not really make sense in non-social settings, 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). 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 (i.e. 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. Again, this is only the average idea of success, which is the most typical by consensus. But how is this consensus formed and why should individuals care? Can’t we define our own success and live by it? Notice that it all depends on the society itself. There is nothing holding any society back from championing prostitutes and putting them at the pinnacle of the success pyramid.

Then, what is a successful man? A miserable little pile of ideals. 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 frequetly, 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 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 to maintain your current state), and actively (play a non-trivial role in society by interacting 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. But think about it. Money is only about power (and France is not Bacon). It buys comfort and influence, including temporary pleasures such as food and sex. Fame and respect gives you more validity. Looking at it, it’s mainly about feeling fulfilled and valid while having the resources to maintain it. Apart from having enough resources, this feeling of self-fulfillment and validation is totally in our heads and under our control (within the limits of our psychological nature). What remains with us is our own long-term progress in life and how content we are with it. Particularly, our long-term relationships with our family and friends is a large part of this. The three conditions above ensure that one can be happy and stay happy. What else can you ask for?

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. The curiosity of the mind can lead us to the stars of success or to the depths of misery, irrespective of our intent. Try to be content with yourself and your life. The materialistic kind of success depends a lot on your luck in life. You can’t avoid your fate, and you can’t change your parents. Accept the flow of life. Or as Void from Berserk puts it: “Everything is within the flows of Causality”. Just live and be thankful for what you have.