Podcast Short: What Is Success and What Is It Not?

What Is Success and What Is It Not?

“Success”.  People chase after this thing that we call “success.”  But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”?  How do we define it?  How does the culture define it?  How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play with define this thing that we call “success?”

Certain things are considered more valuable to achieve, or we grant them more weight, or we give them precedence over other things.  There’s this pre-determined hierarchy of sorts that’s established by the culture, or by a certain industry, or a particular profession.  There are things that are granted an elevated status by virtue of their longevity, or the difficulty involved in achieving them, or the sacrifices that have to be made in order to accomplish them.  There are things that we define as success because few people achieve them, or maybe no one’s achieved them.  Whatever the case, there are an array of definitions.  But I don’t think that that’s what success is.

I don’t think that the definition of success is about achieving some goal, regardless of who defines it.  I think that “success” is primarily defined by what success communicates to us about ourselves.  The goal is secondary.  It’s not the achievement itself, but the fact that we achieved.  Striving for success is frequently an effort driven by our need to convince ourselves that we have worth, or value, or intelligence, or determination, or whatever we need to convince ourselves that we have.  It’s about trying to overcome a failed childhood, or erase the messages of less than supportive parents, or wipe out previous failures so that they quit haunting us.  Success is less about what we achieved, and more about who we are by having achieved.  It grant us something that we’re missing.  It fills a hole.  It compensates for a deficit that we carry around within us (whether that deficit is real or imagined).

But here’s the key.  Three thousand years ago a king said to God, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  We are made in a way that there’s no need to prove ourselves.  Our design, our crafting, our gifting, our abilities, even our limitations are exactly what they should be.  Everything that we are (all of our weaknesses and all of our strengths) are perfectly choreographed.  They combine to create this unique, but potentially powerful balance. There’s an intentionality to us that’s perfectly shaped for the thing that we’ve been put here to do.  So, it’s not about proving our worth and value.  It’s about acting on it.  It’s not about spending our lives proving something that needs no proof.  It’s about living it out.  You have nothing to prove, but you have a lot of great things you can do.  So, believe in yourself and go do great things.