Do You Feel Successful?

How do you define success?

Robert McKeon Aloe

Published in

The Startup

4 min readMar 1, 2021

My wife and I were chatting after the kids went to bed, and the question came up:

Do you feel successful?

Growing up, I had only aimed to complete a Ph.D., and I hadn’t made a plan or a goal that I was trying to achieve beyond that.

I rushed through a bachelors and masters degree to get to my Ph.D., but I didn’t feel successful when I finished; I felt like a failure.

I compared myself to others and felt like an imposter. I felt like people must have had pity on me because I had not gotten more publications, more data, or more success. I had a lot of regrets, and I felt I had more failure than success.

The essence of my problem was that my goal, my definition of success was “more.”

What is success mean to you? More.

More is not achievable or even practical. The goal of more is to be always unsatisfied or even angry. If only I would have done this or that, I would have had more. Then what? I would have still missed out on more.

There is no end to more.

The goal of more does allow the room to grow through failures. Failure is required for success. Planning for and expecting failure is key for success.

So when I was talking to my wife, I didn’t have any goals that popped to the top of my mind. I’m not trying to run the company; I’m trying to get a paycheck. Could that paycheck be more? Sure, but I’m okay with what it is. Could my team ship more products? Sure, but I’m okay with what we’re shipping.

Is my success in life defined solely by my career success?

Over the past few years, I’ve grown what I wanted my goals to be. They are my goals. Nobody else defines them. I can choice my goals as I understand them. I can choice my measures of success as I please.

Nobody else has to define what I must do to feel successful.

My goals are simple, I want to be the person who I want to interact with:

I want to be the friend I want as a friend.

I want to cultivate the culture at work and at home that I want to live and work in.

I want to be the father to my kids that I would want as a father.

I want to be the partner to my wife that I would want in a partner.

I want to be the manager that I would want as a manager.

I want to be the co-worker that I would want as a co-worker.

I want to be the stranger that I would want to befriend.

I want to be the writer of things I would like to read.

I want to be the barista from whom I’d like to serve me an espresso.

I want to be the cook whose food I would like to eat.

I want to appreciate others in the way I would like to be appreciated.

I want to forgive others in the same way I would like them to forgive me.

I want to be of service to others in the way that I would want to be served.

I want to love in the way that I want others to love me.

These goals have no end, nor do they have a great measure of success, but they’re my goals. I can work on them everyday, and I can feel satisfied in knowing I have progress.

I am successful when I’m not worried about feeling successful.

My ultimate measure of success is a very low bar:

It’s none of your business.

What other people think of you is none of your business.

If you like, follow me on Twitter and YouTube where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Medium.

The Startup

Do You Feel Successful?

How do you define success?

Further readings of mine:

Published in The Startup

Written by Robert McKeon Aloe

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