What is Success?

While I’m sure that this might be able to be considered a bit strange, the first thing I’m going to do is to ask you to consider whether or not you perceive Timothy McVeigh to have been a successful person. If you don’t remember who Timothy McVeigh was, he was convicted of performing the terrorist attack commonly known as the Oklahoma City bombing.

At this point you might be wondering why I would include the Oklahoma City bombing as the opening of a treatise on the concept of success. It turned out that McVeigh was, and still is, the most successful domestic terrorist in U.S. history. While there’s no question that this gave McVeigh the status of infamous as opposed to famous, there’s no denying that he was successful and accomplished in what he set out to do, no matter how horrible that may have been. What it goes to show is that the measurement of success can be not only be applied to issues that are considered positive but also incredibly negative and brings me to the point of stating that it’s very important to be careful what you wish for. Did McVeigh ever regret his role in the bombing before his execution? It doesn’t appear so.

So, what is success? Success is, simply, a concept and is only one of the many concepts that fill this website. Actually, concepts, along with strategies are pretty much all this website is about. The vast majority of these concepts and strategies will be meaningful when talking about success. People may not care about the terms concepts and strategies but they perk-up when the word success is mentioned. People are interested in success.

Concepts are “an abstract idea” or “a general notion”, according to Google. Merriam-Webster states that a concept is “something conceived in the mind.” Dictionary.com defines a concept as “an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.” Notice that concepts are strictly structures of the mind. You can’t hold them in your hand but you can hold manifestations of a concept in your hand, assuming it will fit. Some concepts like a house or a car or a rocket are a bit big.

So what do our sources for the meaning of a word say about success? It is something that exists only in the mind. However, put into practice, words tend to take on meanings of their own. People understand what success means by the manifestations of the concept. Success is achievement or attainment of something. It can, literally, be any attainment or achievement. However, people tend to judge success based on the values of the society in which they reside. There seems to be a pecking order of success based on how many people would like to attain or achieve a particular instance of success. For example, virtually everyone in the world that lives in a society where money is used as a means of purchasing goods and services values money. Therefore, if you have a lot of money you are seen as successful. In areas of the world where leaders are elected, people who are elected to public office are seen as successful as they are able to influence the destiny of the area. People who are in charge of companies where a large number of people are employed tend to be viewed as leaders and are also considered successful. A lot of instances of success can easily be measured. You can measure success by dollars or votes or number of employees. As a matter of fact, you can measure success in a multitude of ways.

Who have been the most successful people of all time? According to The Week, a British tabloid, “With a fortune of around $400bn in today’s money, Mansa Musa I of Mali, the first king of Timbuktu, may not be a household name, but was by most estimates one of the richest people in history. Deriving his wealth from his country’s vast salt and gold deposits, which at one time accounted for half the world’s supply, Musa ruled West Africa’s Malian Empire in the early 14th century, constructing hundreds of mosques across the continent, many of which survive to this day.” Note that the article implies that Mansa Musa had half of the world’s “wealth” of the time which was in gold and salt. There wasn’t much economy practiced at the time. Much of the world was simply surviving. The next richest person was Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicholas II) of Russia who had an estimate wealth of “$300-$400bn in today’s money.” John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford appear next on the list. Wikipedia has a list of wealthiest historical figures that might be of interest. The interesting part of these lists is that all of the individuals on these lists lived in a time when there was little technology and nowhere near the “creature comforts” of today. The average twenty-first century person in much of the world lives in potentially more comfort than any of these wealthy historical figures.

Another aspect of success is fame. Want to know who is famous, at least historically? Go here. You can find hundreds and hundreds of famous people, if famous people are what you are interested in. You can also check out a list of celebrities here.

But why worry about someone else’s wealth, fame or celebrity? Actually, why even consider wealth, fame or celebrity at all? If you just want to be a voyeur, well… Okay. If you want to envy people who have attained some form of status due to wealth, fame or celebrity then I’m here to tell you that you’re not only breaking a commandment, psychologically you’re starting to slip into a form of psychosis. There’s no one else on earth that I want to be or trade places with except may the fictional character Raymond Redington. He’s so grounded, knowledgeable and, well… practical. Don’t you think it might be a really good Idea to be grounded, knowledgeable and practical as well? For me, there’s a whole lot of adjectives I’d rather use to describe myself other than rich, famous and celebrated. Well, okay, being rich might not be so bad, but I’m certainly not looking forward to ever being famous and celebrated.

First, let’s talk about traditional success. Traditional success can be measured by the amount of wealth, power, fame and/or celebrity status that you possess. Granted that the only one of those characteristics that can really be measured with any real meaning is wealth and, yes, you can measure subscribers and followers but do subscribers and followers directly impact your bottom line in a measurable way? That can be hard to measure.

Wealth
Wealth is simply an accounting term meaning assets minus liabilities. It’s fairly easy to figure out. You take the sum of the value of the things you own and subtract any debts that you have and you arrive at your net worth, which gives a fair indication of your wealth. Net worth is actually a very important concept. If you are wealthy enough you can, if you desire, have a substantial portion of the hours of the day where you have no commitments to other people. Your time is your own, at least to some degree. Wealth is, generally, a good thing. It allows you the freedom to live the life you choose within the bounds of that wealth.

For people who have little or no wealth they must commit a large portion of their time to some occupation to gather revenue to buy the necessities of life. Usually that means getting a job to “pay the lousy bills” as some folks would say. If you’re lucky or reasonably astute, you can get a job that you really enjoy. Over time people tend to generally accumulate some wealth. In America and most of the more prosperous countries of the world, there are institutions in place which will provide most of the citizenry some form of income in their old age. Note that there is no real consensus on how much money it takes to become wealthy. If you live in California, the amount of money you need to live comfortably is significantly more than in some other states. Yet many people feel that California is the only place they want to live, regardless of the cost of living. There are many, many factors that go into the determination of where to live.

Power
Power can be the second type of success. There are a variety of different types of power. First there is parental power. Your parents had this power over you for several years and good or bad, you didn’t have a lot of choice about it. You could have also experienced sibling power while you lived with your family while growing up. Sometimes your siblings could and would exercise some form of power over you. When you started attending school you experienced the power of your peers and your teachers. In the twentieth century organizational behavioral theorists started coming up with all kinds of theories about power, particularly in the workplace. According to Mind Tools, a professional and personal development website, “In 1959, French and Raven described five bases of power: Legitimate – This comes from the belief that a person has the formal right to make demands, and to expect others to be compliant and obedient. Reward – This results from one person’s ability to compensate another for compliance. Expert – This is based on a person’s high levels of skill and knowledge. Referent – This is the result of a person’s perceived attractiveness, worthiness and right to others’ respect. Coercive – This comes from the belief that a person can punish others for noncompliance. Six years later, Raven added an extra power base: Informational – This results from a person’s ability to control the information that others need to accomplish something.” Apparently, social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven were on the ground floor of the research into organizational behavior when it came to research into power in the workplace. Dr. Nicole Lipkin also discusses various types of power in the workplace such as coercive, connection, expert, formal, informal, informational, legitimate, referent and reward in her book What Keeps Leaders Up at Night: Recognizing and Resolving Your Most Troubling Management Issues.

While workplace issues concerning power will be an experience that will be hard to escape, there will be other issues concerning personal power in your life. Your spouse, your children and your friends may well create issues with power dynamics in your life. I don’t always get to do what I want to do due to concerns from my wife, children and friends along with my concerns about them and my concerns about keeping our relationships as positive as possible. The power dynamics of relationships are interesting, to say the least, even when people aren’t particularly vested in them.

There is also political power that needs to be addressed. Political power is one of the oldest of all forms of power. Once humans started living in groups, someone was always ready and waiting to assume power when the current political leadership started to show signs of decay. The political history of the world is extremely complex. You can make some sense of it here. People who obtain some form of political power always seem to receive deferential treatment and a variety of perks from some segments of society. Notice that people at the national level of politics rarely leave political office voluntarily unless it’s for a more lucrative opportunity. Somehow, it seems to me that it’s not an incumbent’s desire to continue in their selfless dedication to public service that keeps them in the election cycles. Call me a cynic, but…

Fame
Does everyone want their fifteen minutes of fame? No, I don’t believe so. But it’s also obvious that some people do and some people will do virtually anything to get it. Now I can fully understand someone being a little weird on a YouTube channel that makes them six figures a year. They don’t have a boss, they get lots of attention and they can often be very flexible about when they have to actually commit time to their channel. I’m not sure why some people seem to think infamy can be equated with success. I think it may be the old adage that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” in play. I think some people actually believe that. At least it seems that they must.

Celebrity
So, what’s the difference between a famous person and a celebrity? I’m not actually sure. Google says a celebrity is a famous person. Merriam-Webster says celebrity is “the state of being celebrated” or “a famous or celebrated person.” Dictionary.com defines celebrity as “a famous or well-known person.” Maybe I should just say that a celebrity is “officially” famous. That way there could be at least some difference.

This ends the section of traditional success. This is the kind of success that most people understand and want. Further, if most people are like me, just give me the money and “to hell” with any fame and power and celebrity status. That sounds like way-too-much work and responsibility. Plus, I don’t want a lot of people to know how totally irresponsible I can be spending all that money. It might make me look bad and that could get around, if you know what I mean.

Nontraditional Success
Now, It’s time to talk about Nontraditional Success. That’s my favorite form of success. To do the explanation of it justice I’m going to tell a story about a fictional friend of mine named Charles who is more likely to be known as Chuck or Chucky or The Chuckster or ChuckMiester or ChuckALuck by his friends. Chuck is about my age and we have similar stories, the only difference being that Chuck’s story is pure fiction, but very representative, like most fictional stories. Chuck was born into a family of misfits but he got lucky and had grandparents that took the boy under their wing a great part of the time when he was a child. They provided good role models, but hardly the best. As Chuck matured into a teenager he showed some promise. God had been good to the Chuckster. Unfortunately, it was the sixties when Chucky experienced puberty and there was still the issue of all the misfits in his family along with all the other misfits of the sixties in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Chuck enlisted in the United States Marine Corp but Chucky flunked his physical so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam and do his patriotic duty to his Uncle Sam. So, he dropped out of high school, got a low-paying manual labor job and partied a lot. Eventually, most of his close friends moved away to go to college or to find better jobs and Chucky decided that it was probably a good thing to move to one of the college towns and join some of them. So, he did. God had been good to the Chuckster. He had great friends from reasonably good families. Their only shortcoming was that they just liked to party a bit too much. You can’t have too much fun, right? So, Chuck got a job and started going to university part-time. Eventually, he started going to university full-time and working part-time for a Fortune 500 company. He did okay, not great, and he still partied too much but, hey, he was still young and he knew a lot of people and he had a lot of fun. Eventually, though, his friends started graduating and moving off and the parties Chuck went to started getting smaller. Then, one day, Chuck graduates. He gets a Bachelor’s Degree and the Fortune 500 company that he had worked for part-time while he was going to university offers him a job in sales in a city close enough to the university that he can still commute and take classes. Great, he thinks. So, he starts making good money and the job is incredibly easy, so he still spends a lot of time in the university town, especially on the weekends. All his friends have couches and enjoy seeing him periodically.

One day, Chucky stops at a restaurant for breakfast. There is a nice looking female, a bit younger than Chucky, who serves him breakfast and they kind of hit it off in a sense and for the next few weeks Chucky stops in to have breakfast more often and only when Diane, the waitress he hit it off with, was on duty. One day he asks her out to a movie and, a few months later, Chucky, who had never really been interested in making commitments to the more-than-a-few females he had dated over the years, married Diane in a ceremony performed by her brother at her parents house. Something had changed in Chucky. I’m not sure what it was. Some people simply refer to it as the-cycle-of-life which implies that there seems to be this cycle of events in most people’s lives that eventually results in a couple committing to a relationship for more than a few months. I had run around with Chucky a bit in our younger days and I was surprised when I found out that he had gotten married. Over the next couple of years Charles and Diane had a couple of children, a boy and a girl. They bought a house and Diane was a stay-at-home mom until the kids got a little older and then she went to work at the same Fortune 500 company where Chucky worked while Diane’s mom watched the kids. I would see Chucky every year or two at a get together with some of our old friends and he would fill me in on what he was doing. Life was good for Chucky. He and Diane were happy together, well, at least reasonably happy and the kids grew up without any major issues. The family had found a church that gave them some spiritual support. Chucky and Diane had kept working for the Fortune 500 company and moving up the corporate ladder. The kids had graduated from high school and had gone on to college. Over the years I had seen less and less of Charles and Diane. It was that cycle-of-life thing. I found all this out when I ran into them at a funeral for one of the “old crowd” that had passed away prematurely. I had gone out to lunch with Charles and Diane after the funeral and we had a great afternoon catching up. I asked them what their plans were for the future and they said they were going to retire in the near future and do a little traveling. Both of them had been lucky enough to have been able to get vested in the company pension plan before the Fortune 500 company stopped offering it to new employees. They had also been there when the company had initiated matching contributions to a new company perk called a Simplified Employee Pension Plan Individual Retirement Account. This meant that, when they retired they would have a total of six checks coming into their bank account each month. Chucky and Diane would draw their company’s retirement plan money and they could start taking money out of their SEP-IRAs and they would each draw their Social Security. They said that the house would be paid for by then, they had managed to get the kids through college and the kids, who had delivered a couple of grandkids to them were still living close by so that they still got together frequently. They were both in good health and they planned to do a little traveling and pray for more grandkids. I told them that sounded great and when we parted we promised to keep in touch.

Now the above story is fictional. There never was a Charles or a Diane. But Charles and Diane were simply fictional stand-ins for other people in my life. I knew a lot of people in my younger days who liked to have a good time and, over the years, got married and seemed to settle into a somewhat typical middle-class American existence. They had two cars which they parked in their two car garages on their three bedroom brick homes, assuming the garage wasn’t full of junk. They had kids and tried to “get-by” and prosper. With a little luck they stayed married, got the kids out of the house and looked forward to a bit of retirement.

The key question here is whether you feel that Charles and Diane as well as hundreds of millions of others throughout the world that mirror their story to some degree, are successful. I like to call this Nontraditional Success even though I’m not sure you can actually classify twentieth century or twenty-first century perceptions of success to have any traditions to them, at least not in America. You certainly might be able to make the case that some societies, in particular societies that practice or have practiced primogeniture as a custom or even as a legal doctrine, can be said to have traditions that tend to define success or the lack of it. Yet America, which has, in the past, been known as being anti-monarcial and, for all practical purposes, a country where meritocracy was the rule of the day. Meritocracy tends to preclude and supplant many traditional paths to society’s perceptions of success. Do you consider people who lead reasonably “good” lives worthy of the adjective successful? Yes, I do understand that, any way you slice it, the concept of success is incredibly subjective, at best. Yet, in principle isn’t the concept of being a “decent human being” something that should be worthy of at least a consideration for being something of a success story? Of course it should.

But, I have an even better way of deciding what constitutes success. But before I do let me tell you another story, this one actually being one that is true. I have, at various times over the past twenty years, gotten together with one or more friends I have known for as many as fifty years or more. Further, it was not uncommon for there to be some alcohol or perhaps even some illegal substances (none of which I have imbibed for almost fifty years). Once, during one of these sessions someone asked me what my claim to being successful might be and I thought about it for a moment and I said “Well, I’m sure-as-hell more educated than anyone in this room.”, and I was right. I was. Later I would dwell on the issue of what makes a person successful and I realized that the question of what makes a person successful may have been answerable, but whether someone believes that they, or anyone else for that matter, is successful isn’t something that is set in stone. Bernie Madoff was the perfect example of my generation. Who had a better reputation and was more credentialed than Bernie Madoff? Yet, when the truth came out, who was more evil? Another prime example of success gone awry was Anthony Bourdain. He may have led the “high life” on all of the major continents of the world but in the end he was the epitome of the troubled soul. Success is, well… subjective and very possibly, momentary. It can be gone at any minute. Another interesting aspect of super-successful people is Bruce Jenner. Having graced the cover of boxes of Wheaties during the late 1970s, his/her new persona, Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair in 2015. How do you understand success with some of these dichotomies playing out. Am I confused about such issues? I am.

Fortunately, I slowly arrived at a conclusion over a period of time. Who should be concerned about success? Well, in a sense we all should, or at least we should be concerned about our mental and physical health. No one, well, I’m assuming that the rational way to look at life is that no one would want to be depressed or have to deal with a form of mental or physical illness. Don’t we all want to feel good about our lives or at a very minimum not feel bad about it? Sure, life has some trials and tribulations, but what I want on a personal level is to feel good about who I am and how I am leading my life. This led me to start looking more deeply at the question of whether or not I was successful and perhaps focus on changing my overall paradigm to one of asking the question of whether I believed that I was successful or not. Ultimately, if I were asking others if they thought I was being successful it would simply depend on what some other person might believe about me. That perception would be closed by their own preconceptions about what success “looked like” or some other value judgment that depended on the norms of society.

What I came to realize, what conclusion that I drew, in other words, my personal paradigm shift was that I needed to reframe my posture on success to one of whether or not I believed I was successful. In the end, that’s the only thing that should really matter. I shouldn’t give a rat sass about whether anyone else was successful. What difference did it really make to me? I decided that my only issue with success should be whether I believed that I was successful or not. Ultimately, it wasn’t very hard to make the transition from asking what success was and did I meet the criteria for being successful to asking myself if I believed I was successful.

I was lucky in a sense. I did that a long time ago. It was good. For me, there are so many things that can’t be answered in a truthful manner because they are either subjective to the whims of society or no real answer is known. I call those Divine Mysteries. The issue of success is one of the Divine Mysteries, which are something I’ve labored with far too much in my life. I have a section on them on this website and my advice to someone about them is deal with them if you must but I often say to myself that they are best left alone as they can consume you.

My Perspective on Success
It’s your life. Live it the way you want. I’m going to, at least as long as the rest of the world will let me. I do not want fame or celebrity. I don’t need or want a lot of people wanting a slice of my time that I might not want to give to them. I don’t need power, other than the power to lead my life on my terms. I don’t want to be a leader. I’ll leave that to other people who need to experience leadership a lot more than I do. I do enjoy having enough money to be comfortable, which for me is fairly close to the comfort range of the average American. I like central heat and air conditioning, hot water, flush toilets and plenty of electrical outlets along with any appliances I might like to utilize. I like being able to work when I want and having enough wealth to be able to spend months or even years without working if I so choose. I like having enough money to pursue my favorite hobby of traveling around America and overseas to see the natural wonders God has manifested for us and the creations of my fellow human beings. I have sought and still seek understanding. I have sought and still seek the truth. I feel like my path in this world has been a good one. I believe I am successful. You don’t have to feel successful to enjoy life, but it’s nice if you do.

So, what would you like to experience? This would be a good exercise to actually undertake if you wanted to understand your own personal feelings about the concept of what you believe about success. One way to determine your feelings about success is to determine what you want in life in terms of relationships, materialism and spiritualism. After all, you are one of the most important, if not the most important, person in your life. You should know how you feel about success and write it down for reflection at a later date. Believe me, those perceptions can change.

If you want to understand success, you should do it on your own terms. Create your own definitions of success, even if someone has created those exact definitions before. Live life on your own terms but, just as one final commentary that I need to make, no one, in all probability, wants you to become another Timothy McVeigh.