What is Success?
What do we want to achieve today, tomorrow and before we die. Success is a destination, a goal which provides us with a direction and a plan to get there. But where is there?
Ah, there changes with time. Funny but when I was a consultant a client would say to me "don't move the goal posts". They were right to a point to not keep changing the original goals but my answer was as we approach our goal we can then see a path to a better goal.
And so our life is a progression of moving the goal posts. As we achieve one goal, one success, we move that goal forward. Not everyone does. Some may be happy and stay with their success.
When I was a little boy, I stood by my grandfathers belt and looked up. I said to myself then that one day I would grow to be as tall as him. He was 75 years old then and I said that one day I would be 75 years old. Well with a snap of a finger or a wiggle of the nose, here I am. Taller than my grandfather and 70 but not yet 75 although that will come in a second as well. My childhood to senior citizen happened in an instant. Here I am now. During that path while growing up time took forever but in hindsight it is an instant.
As a young boy my goal was to finish school, grade school then high school then university. Those goals seemed far away and impossible but eventually they came. That was what was most important then. After graduating my goal was to become an adult. That took many years or maybe even decades. But the goals were clear. Sports goals were the clearest and I was dedicated to being a ski racer, an instructor, a top ranked tennis player and then coach, a cyclist then a powerlifter and a powerlifting coach and gym owner and meet organizer. These were all clear goals with a path of applying myself to hard work to get there. As I reached one, I transitioned to the next one.
These were all physical goals on a progressive straight time line forward. But I also had mental or spiritual goals. In my thirties, I wrote quite a bit about what kind of person I wanted to be. Wait, I even remember at 11 years old walking to school (grade 7 at St. Vincent de Paul) and asking myself what kind of person I wanted to be. I presented myself with the choices of being a bad person because the bad boys got all the girls or being a really good person who would do everything by the book and be a model student or bookworm. I made the decision then to be in the middle, not one extreme or the other. In my thirties, I will need to find that paper if I can but I remember describing what kind of person I wanted to be. It was more important to me to be kind and compassionate, to understand people and to be sincere. I actually wrote that I wanted to learn to be intimidating when I needed to be and to be able to see into or through people. Years later, I read this list and realized that I had become this person I wanted to be. Funny, but I also wrote that I wanted to ride down the California coast on a motorcycle. I hadn't even thought of owning a motorcycle or getting a license. But, a few years later I found myself driving down route A1A on the Pacific coast of California looking down at the ocean on a motorcycle. I realized then the power of setting your goals and the feeling of achieving them, the feeling of success.
Along the way, life is full of smaller and bigger goals and successes and yes disappointments. So what is success? Well in simple terms it is achieving something, something that you were on a path to achieve whether you thought you could or couldn't. Success is a feeling. A short euphoric dopamine feeling of exhaling a breath of contentment. I did it! I can't believe I did!