With Purpose Success, part 20

I often think of the glossy photos of moguls and celebrities that regularly grace the covers of magazines. These men and women are promoted as the very definitions of success-captains of industry, fashion trendsetters, daring newsmakers. They live in large houses and drive-nay, are driven-around town in their Bentleys. Yet I have my own take on this picture of success. I landed on the cover of Inc. magazine in 1989 and at the time regarded it as a badge of honor, my ticket to an exclusive and desirable club of highly successful individuals. When your mug shows up on a magazine cover a funny thing happens: other cover boys and girls invariably seek you out. So I began to befriend other "success" stories, and it turns out that more than a few of them had been divorced several times; more than a few of them had kids in drug rehab; and more than a few of them hadn't talked to their living parents for more than a decade.
Some of them seemed to have mortal enemies around every bend. Were they really successful?
Unfortunately, we've created a society where we too often define people as successful even though we don't like them, even though they may be horrendous human beings, even though they haven't done anything that we truly admire. Sure, these so-called successes may have created the next widget and made their stockholders billions of dollars. Maybe they have the latest hairstyle, buns of steel, and a fancy car. But the rest of their life might be a wreck. We have allowed the notion of success to become inextricably tied to material gain and outward appearances, and this definition is a sham and will not serve you well in the years ahead.
It's time to rewrite the rules of success. You are entering a time of life when your innate longing to share what you've learned may be just beginning to flower. Success at this time of life will be very different for different people. Aristotle equated success to happiness and wrote that "all men desire happiness, but each man has a different idea of it." Plato struggled with the concept as well. His view was that life's finish line- true happiness-is a moving target. You never actually get there. At different ages you have different ideals, and you think if you could just have what someone else has you'd be happy. But when you get there you find you're then operating from a higher base and with a higher standard for what would make you feel successful.
As a child you felt successful if you scored good grades, got along with your friends, and made Mom and Dad happy. As a teen, success was about excelling in a sport or artistic endeavor, going to the prom with a "dream" date or getting into a good college. As a young adult, success was about getting a job, pleasing your boss, starting and raising your family, keeping a tidy home, and optimizing your earning power. It's at this time of life when you generally begin to define success by position, wealth, or fame. In fact, one dictionary definition of success is "impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power."
We are practically bred to embrace that model; it can be difficult to break free from it. The reality, though, is that you must decide for yourself what defines success in this next stage of life. If you rate yourself against someone else's definition, you will never know the kind of success that
I'm talking about.
I submit that true success is probably a little like pornography: it's difficult to define-but, in the immortal words of Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." Perhaps you cannot see it yet.