At the end of your life, how will you know you’ve lived a successful life?
Is it how much money you’ve made, how many friends you’ve acquired, how many people you’ve loved, how successful your career has been, how much you’ve given to the people left to carry on, how well you’ve raised your children, how happy or content you’ve felt, how much joy you’ve given in your life or something else?
When you’re looking back on your life and you can only pick one thing to measure success by, what would you choose to gauge your life by? Why?
It’s all those aspects that you mention but the most crucial point is to identify and then seize on the few chances you have in your life with the utmost consistency and commitment. There aren’t as many real opportunities as people are made to believe. Doing that can make a difference and may be the basis for a successful life as you describe.
I don’t want to be creepy or morbid but as someone who once thought they had reached the end of their life ( turned out to be a mistake) and who has recently been at the deaths of loved ones, I think at the end of your life your thoughts turn to more spiritual things and acceptance and all the considerations of whether your life was successful or not don’t really matter and seem irrelevant, even funny or trivial
Really, what seems important now and the measures of success won’t seem important as you make your peace
Measure? Success?
Surely we can move beyond that! Who is to measure or judge? Who defines what success is, or even why a notion of success is a worthy yardstick?
Those who wish to be remembered after they’ve died do make me laugh. You’ll be dead, matey, so by then the one person who will not know, not be able to know, is yourself. So that should not matter in the least.
I reached a point where I worked out that I need not work to earn any more and still be comfortable and content. That is not success, that is simply luck. And in terms of most measures it has not, so far, been a life that is very successful. Very few highlights. Certainly soon forgot after I pop my clogs. Joining the billions of forgotten. Excellent.
Based on the question, you’re asking, maybe a better question would be, how do you define success?
And the potential reason for defining it is to inform how you choose to live your life. If you feel that we’re all just like ants, crawling around waiting to get squashed, why follow the laws? If you follow the laws because it’s less of a hassle than to be punished, then maybe success is not feeling hassled.
Or maybe success is getting through another day to. . . .?
I would say that success comes from within and is being happy inside your own skin…
It’s not about other people or wealth, but how you see yourself…
The ability to deal with anything life throws at you…
Thank you Mr Kipling…Both of you…
I agree, Bob. Each of us should have started off by defining success. It turns out that people understand different things about it. Maybe the words measure and even success trigger specific associations. I like your take since it’s not so much related to wealth, money, accumulated material things. A “successful life” can be the result of felicitous decisions and the way you lived your life in general giving you a deep inner satisfaction about how life has gone. This satisfaction and happiness will not be measured or judged by anyone but yourself.
