What does success mean to you? What do you want to accomplish in order to be successful?
- A comfortable, safe job
- Seven children
- The freedom to work on your creative projects
- Live a long, healthy life
- Five million dollars in your saving account
- A very big house with a backyard and lots of dogs
- Climb all seven summits
- A Lamborghini Veneno Roadster
- Visit 100 countries
- Own a boat
- Writ a book
- Be a Nobel laureate
- Find a cure for cancer
- Get your PhD
- Lots of passive income
- Have a building named after you
- Live a life of uncertainty
- Be a professor at Harvard
- Make enough money to support your family
- Recognition for being the best at what you do
- Get along well with others
- The ability to impact five people’s lives every year
- Make an impact on the entire world
- Do work that people talk about
- Have your own photography exhibit
- Get $100,000 for a commissioned painting
- Star in a blockbuster film
- Be a major league baseball player
- Be CEO of a Fortune 500 company
- Own your own vineyard
- Sail around the world
- Five million Twitter followers
- Direct your own movie
- The freedom to live wherever you want
- Monetize your blog
- Speak 15 languages
- Be a major politician
- Finish an Ironman
- Release your own album
- Be published in the New Yorker
- Notoriety
- Make the world a better place
- Be on the cover of Rolling Stone
- Be the President of the United States
- Have a three star Michelin restaurant
- Participate in NYC’s Fashion Week
- Be a happy, positive person
- Retire by 40
- Be a surf bum in Costa Rica
- Hike the Appalachian Trail
- Be a Divemaster
- Be a General or an Admiral
- Lose 20 pounds
- Run a marathon every year
- Live a life of leisure
- Be tenured
- Ski a black diamond
- Win the Super Bowl
- Publish 50 books
- Join the Screenwriters Guild
- Have your book made into a movie
- Win a Pulitzer
- Bench 300 pounds
- Danc in a music video
- Make people laugh
- Write 500 words per day
- Be an ambassador
- Live in a foreign country
- An Olympic gold medal
- A happy, healthy relationship
- Have a great relationship with your entire family
- A job you love going to every day
- Financial security
- A life of adventure
- Grow old with someone
- Help people for a living
- Own a real estate empire
- Enjoy the little things in life
- Publish your own poetry collection
- Work for yourself
- Own a bakery
- Write and act in your own one (wo)man play
- A successful restaurant
- Be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year
- Live in the present moment
- Five months of vacation every year
- Fail often
- Reliable friends in your life
- Raise healthy children who become successful
- Design your own fashion line
- Be faithful in your religion
- Own a bookstore
- Be a successful entrepreneur
- 10,000,000 downloads of your podcast
- Genuine, meaningful connections with others
- Make what you need while working as little as possible
- A platinum record
- Speak at TED
- Be a good parent
- Help others do what they love
This list of possible goals is neverending…
David Brooks writes about two types of virtues in his book, A Road to Character. Eulogy virtues apply to our inner character, and résumé virtues focus on our external career. We spend our lives working on our résumé virtues, and we define often success by these external measures: a good job, financial security, awards, and college degrees. But most of us want to be remembered for our eulogy virtues, or things like kindness, empathy, respect for others and honesty, that are the values we want to live by.
Do your goals for success include living by your eulogy virtues? Because I would argue that the most successful people are those who live by their values. Regardless of their external achievements, those who live authentically by being consistent in their actions, whether or not someone is looking, are the ones who are remembered for being successful.
. . .
Feature Image Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash
No Comments