What is success?

Have you ever heard of someone in your very outer circle, meaning, friends of friends, or relatives of friends, or relatives of relatives, as kind of someone who didn’t quite “make it”, only to learn later of the great love that people felt for him, and the esteem in which they held him? I recently had that experience and although I never really knew this individual personally, I was ashamed that I had swallowed this ‘unsuccessful’ description of him without a thought or even a challenge in my own mind of who he was and what were his accomplishments. When I recently questioned my own feeling about regrets that I had over the things that I had and had not done, someone suggested to me that perhaps I was using someone else’s yardstick to measure success. And I began to see that we need to measure success in our lives by what we ourselves value. While some value money and the outward trappings of financial success and security, it is just as sure that others measure success by the number of friends cultivated and cherished, and still others by the number of good works accomplished, or whether if tithing, for example, is a value to them, they are meeting their responsibility to do so. I think that what you value bears thinking about on a regular basis, because, as we are well aware, our values change, due to circumstance and experience. Not that if you valued being a good and charitable person, that might change, but if you find yourself in new circumstances, what it means to be a good and charitable person might change. Let me give an example: if you are used to donating a certain amount of money every month to the food band, and you suddenly lose your job and have to watch your pennies, then you might not have the money to donate, but rather might have more time for hands- on help. It doesn’t make you any less charitable, it just makes you charitable in a different way, and both are sorely needed. Whether you do one or the other, you are successful and true to your own yardstick. So I urge you to define your idea of success so that you can live up to it, and you are not always running around trying and perhaps falling short of someone else’s definition of success. Look around--who do you admire, and why? What do they do to achieve their idea of success, and what do they have to bypass or leave undone? Is that OK with you? If you have to miss out on your child’s sports league in order to have some level of success, or if you have to disappoint your parents, how does that feel to you? Be honest with yourself and weigh your wants and needs in the balance. Find your own yardstick for success, and keep looking, because as sure as the days pass, your measure will change. And then be the best of what you have decided is important to offer the world. It will make you feel great, and will make the world a better place.