Success is...............?

I have been thinking about success. I've been thinking about the definition of success and how it changes over your life.

So as a teenager, being successful, if I think about my kids, it's having the right trainers and being around the right kids. The cool kids. It was no different when I was a kid, other than it was Kickers that the cool kids wore, not the Clarks variant Chuckers………..

It was the trainers you wore, the bike you rode, and bizarrely the carrier bag that you brought your PE kit to school in. When I see my boys smoothing out their bright yellow JD Sports bags so that they last a bit longer, I can see that everything has changed and nothing, all at the same time.

School, college university, it's all about the next bit of paper, that next rung on the academic ladder.

As a counsellor, the numbers of hours, feedback, and evidence of change.

And then in work, success is all about climbing that ladder. Going from one job to the next and you're always looking above you to think what's the next job, how is this going to take me to there. When and how long will it take.

Within my primary family, Jewish community that I grew up in, success was different again, a bit confused. Cash, as in the earning thereof within my family, but only because there wasn’t the nice Jewish husband earning it on my behalf, and within the wider community, who knows. Something about keeping a kosher home, a Jewish family, and being a good Jew. Whatever that means.??

And then as a Mum, success is about how good a Mum you are and are you a better Mum if your baby is weaned quicker, eats a wider variety of foods quicker, sleeps through the night quicker, and so on and so forth. The social media snaps of the day trips here, the holidays taken there.

I remember sitting in a meeting at work, and shooting the breeze before we started about what we had done at the weekend. At that point, my weekends were full of the busy busy of small kids, and the recovery from the week. That Friday night glass of wine, Saturday night takeaway, getting the school uniforms and lunch boxes ready for Monday. Other colleagues had different weekends, less kid-focused, but about recovery all the same. One talked about their love and passion for their garden but that they weren’t spending a lot of time in it now. They didn’t garden anymore but hoped to pick it back up when they retired.

It reminded me of a conversation with a friend of a friend one night at a party who talked about the kids, that he would be spending more time with once he had built the business enough to relax a little. Nearly 16 years later, it’s starting to feel more like a reality, but the kids, the teenagers, they’ve moved on too. Less time at home, less hanging on every word of their Dad, more gaming, more gamers, more thinking about games………

Success and its meaning often feels like an external, extrinsic thing. Badges, certificates, titles, answering that what do you do question, photos of stuff, places visited on social media, numbers of clients, cash earned, things possessed, rungs climbed on the ladder and busy busy, hustle hustleness.

As you get older though, midlife, I wonder if your definition of success changes. I see it in my friends, the people I coach, and others around us. While the external world carries on its busy busy, I see people pausing for breath, thinking about stuff like legacy, letting go of the extra baggage, thinking about what they want to do with their lives, the people they surround themselves with, what they want to do with their one precious life and it's few precious heartbeats going forward. Success becomes less about what you are going to prove and to who, towards an intrinsic sense of good enoughness, of knowing, of wisdom, of the knowledge that when all is said and done, maybe the only things that matter are the people whose lives have been impacted on because of you, the difference you have made, the time you have spent thinking about things that are bigger than you and how you fit into the world.

Maybe success becomes the imprint and shapes you leave on the world, the knowledge that something or someone is different because of you and maybe that becomes enough. Good enough.

What do you think? ?