What is Success?

Defining success shows us what we really think we should achieve or what our goals ought to be. The absence of these goals could be viewed as a life under-lived or wasted. Important as this term is for the whole meaning and direction of our lives, most people never take the time to explicitly define it.

There are four levels of success.

The first level of success transforms the first level of happiness into the criteria for a life well lived. Hence, accumulating many possessions, pleasures, creature comforts, food, wine, and the other epicurean delights would constitute a life well lived.

We cannot wait for the discontent and emptiness of the first crisis to dislodge us from superficiality. Thirty-five or forty years could have been spent on a treadmill or in a dream world that simply did not address questions about contribution, dignity, or love.

The second level of success follows from the second level of happiness. It transforms the values of the comparison game into the criteria for a life well lived.

What makes a life well lived? Having more accomplishments, status, popularity, and higher position than others, etc. Having more and being more is success. The second crisis can dislodge one from this view, but it takes so long, causes so much human misery, so much breakdown in relationships, and so much time and talent wasted."

The third level of success transforms the third level of happiness into the criteria of a life well lived. If people have reached the third level of happiness, they ought to make this contributory view of life as specific as possible. They need to remind themselves in writing and through friends, which contributions and relationships constitute their reason for being. They might want to sit down and write the names of the children, the family, the friends, the colleagues, employees, community members, etc. to whom they have the opportunity to contribute.

No matter how empowering and enlightening this view of success is, it has an Achilles’ heel. It plays into a fatal flaw in human idealism. It makes us yearn for an ideal of Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that we cannot produce, and that others cannot produce for us. It leaves us open to disappointment, frustration, dashed romanticism, and dashed idealism. It tempts us to think we can do it all ourselves, to believe too much in our own perspectives and accomplishments, to exaggerate our already overly-exercised belief in our own heroism.

The fourth level of success counteracts these problems because it brings a universal perspective to the fore. If one has faith, one might call it ‘God’s perspective.’

If one has faith, this is accomplished by letting God be the center, not only of the physical universal, but of all personal and interpersonal universes.

This universal perspective, then, not only helps to remedy the problems of failure, burnout, and arrogance, it helps us to rejoice in goods not produced by us and not even related to us. In short, it produces an empathy similar to that of a little child who begins to laugh because everyone else in the room is laughing, although she does not understand why.

Those with faith will say, of course, that this is only possible with God’s grace, that is, with the assurance of Unconditional Love manifest in unconditional patience, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and peace, leading me to where I cannot lead myself.