Hi all –
Do you remember being a kid and (if you do), do you also
happen to remember how you would have defined “success?”
Is it the same definition that you had in college? How about when you got your first
job?
Or when you married?
And how about now, at this point in your life? How do you define success now?
Is it the same definition as when you were a kid?
I’m guessing not.
When I was a kid (dinosaurs were still roaming the earth
then), successful people lived in the best part of town. They had big houses and drove big new
cars. They were bank managers or
company presidents or doctors or lawyers.
Maybe they came from old money,
born with a silver spoon in their mouths.
Sometimes they hired maids to clean their houses and
gardeners to maintain their yards.
Their kids went to private schools and had tutors. Their families sometimes took vacations
in Europe and went on cruises.
They had fashionable parties attended by others of their
class and social standing.
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Of course the thing you had to have to be able to live like
this was a lot of money. So
basically, success = money. The
more money you had, the more successful you were.
When I was attending college, many students were intent on
careers giving them the best chance of getting on the gravy train, i.e. earning good money and partaking of the
successful lifestyle. There was
even a TV show called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” which ran from 1984
to 1995. Americans wanted to
emulate these people.
On the way up the corporate
ladder, however, some people are confronted by uncomfortable choices. Success in business often necessitates
long work hours and dedication to the company. This may involve uprooting the family to move where the work
is. To continue in this vein means ceding involvement with the family and
losing closeness to one’s children and spouse. It means stress for everybody.
This is one of the points in life where it is valuable to
reevaluate the definition of success.
Is it better to make sacrifices to rise to the top of the company so you
can buy anything your family wants or is it better to scale back the lifestyle,
settle for less money and be more available to the family? Making that latter choice is most
likely a career killer.
And, by the way, if you are working long hours, are you
still in touch with your family enough to know what it is that they truly
want? Is it something that you can
buy someday?
Think ahead to the end stage of your life. How might you think of success at that
time?
Take care,
Kevin
Reminder: If you are unsure about the meaning of the
idioms used in this message, please refer to "Idioms, Figures of Speech,
and Proverbs" posted on this blog in August 2013. An alternative is
to look at http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com
In my opinion defining the degree of success using money and life style richness is faulty and injected in our brain by the media. Was Steve Jobs successful dying at early age leaving tons of dollars to I do not know who? I doubt it. I doubt it!
ReplyDeleteSuccess is achieving a state of contentment with what was giving to you in life (including richness or the lack off).
Health, loving family and friends, and above all contentment with oneself, are the real measures of success
Each of us has our own personal, subjective definition of success. Mine aligns closely with yours. I would add that success includes being a person who is willing and able to be a positive influence on others. However, the unfortunate fact is that society’s objective view of success focuses on status, power, money while minimizing the family. This creates a huge strain on marriages and families as they seek two different types of success simultaneously – a happy family and corporate success.
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