I consider myself successful.
When you hear of someone being successful, what comes to mind is status, money, power, athletic performance, grandious achievements or maybe even Instagram followers.
It’s the top ten biggest, best, greatest, longest, richest, strongest, sexiest success stories of all time!
These are the conventional metrics of success, the ideas of success sold to us by social media and the religion of progress above all else.
If you think this is the only form of success, I am sorry to say you’ve been duped.
We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Success is relative. It depends upon the metric you choose to measure success by and despite what the media machine might be telling you there are no rules about which metric you choose.
Here are some metrics that I use:
The state health and wellbeing
How well I serve my community
The number of friends and family that I’ve supported through hard times
The number of times I smile in a day
The number of trees I have planted
The number of minutes I have spent listening to music on spotify (because music makes me feel alive)
Deciding which metrics of success you value rather than measuring yourself against conventional forms of success, will save you a great amount of despair.
What metrics of success do you value the most?