What does success mean to you?

Sooner or later in life, we are all confronted with the essential question how we define success. No matter if this happens during a job interview or while making plans for the future, finding an answer is not always easy. The word “success” can have quite a lot of different meanings to different people. If you’d randomly ask one hundred people what success is all about, you’d get a vast variety of different answers. When it comes to success, reaching common consensus about a definition is extraordinarily difficult. Some might even say that it’s quite impossible. This article is intended to help you get a good overview about the meaning of success. Its aim is to inspire you to develop your own definition of success for your own life. So let’s explore the different meanings of success in the following.

Many people struggle greatly when it comes to defining success. This is mostly because success is a rather subjective term. It simply means many different things to many different people. Another factor that contributes to this problem is the way mainstream culture portrays success. According to the mainstream view, a person is successful when they earn a lot of money, have a big house and a fancy car. As a result, many people have not only adopted but also integrated this superficial portrayal of success into their life. Consequently, their aims, ambitions and dreams are heavily centered around money, power, status and (sometimes also) fame.

Primarily defining success based on the amount of money you earn can be quite dangerous. Even more so, if you believe success is all about having money, you may be setting yourself up for an unpleasant surprise.

What does success mean to you? Is it all about career, money and social status or does it also include aspects such as happiness, fulfillment and joy?

For this very reason, developing your very own definition of success is quite important. Otherwise, you risk wasting precious time and energy on the pursuit of superfluous things that do not fulfill you. Also, by chasing another person’s version of success you might end up having no true sense of a purpose in life.

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”