Thousand Reflections: Personal Success
Issue #2
About Thousand Reflections: Thousand Network is full of people from all walks of life and background. Here, we try to tap into this collective wisdom by offering a prompt every week and sourcing short responses from the members.
This week’s prompt:
Success is one of those words we always throw around, assuming everyone is using it the same way. But each individual defines it in their own way and context.
In 100–200 words, offer your thoughts on the concept of personal success. What does success mean to you personally? Is it possible to have a general definition of success? What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a successful person?
I’m currently writing this as I sit next to a pool on a sunny day in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The wifi barely works so I’m writing this on the Notes app on my phone. It’s my first time here and I’m hanging out with a woman I just met through a women’s community. On my journey here through Boston from NYC, I spotted another member of Thousand (hi Mykim) whom I haven’t yet had the chance to meet in person. Even though we didn’t get a chance to chat, something about this whole experience of the journey out here feels like the culmination of this latest chapter of my life. I’m extremely grateful to have the privilege to explore like this.
Today, that is what success is to me: being surrounded by people and communities who continue to challenge me, support me, and lift me up. It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
My definition of success has changed over time. It’s a deeply personal thing, and it can be external and internal. Externally, I guess I was successful on paper. I went to a great university, was top of my investment banking class at Goldman Sachs, have made multiple career transitions, and most recently, was a young executive at a celebrity-founded startup where 20-something Tiffany thought having her own office and sitting in on board meetings was “making it.” People still ask me why I left Goldman. People wonder what my next step is going to be.
I came across this quote a few years ago that really stuck with me and good advice for anyone: Don’t compare your behind the scenes to someone else’s highlight reel. It’s the truth. Think about what success means for yourself and run with that. The things that make me feel “successful” are seemingly small things to other people and have nothing to do with work.
Success is not a Thing, it is a work-in-progress. Success is a day-to-day questioning, not just then but now too. If you ask people what is success, they start listing things, things that don’t exist yet. Even “successful” people will do so, even if they admit that they are also currently successful. It is something that is always developing and moving depending on your perspective.
For me personally, success is simple: being able to do what I love for the majority of my time.
Success is a really confusing term for me. As I approach it further I became more confused. It’s almost like a comparison between yours and others’ knowledge, wealth, and even relationships.
Success also seems to have different short-term and long-term definitions. If you see someone earning less in the short-term, but acquiring the skills for longer term success and higher earning power later, that person might be considered a failure for the short term.
To me, success is achieving what you have aspired for, or being able to put in your best effort. By this latter, I mean that you have no regrets about not achieving something because you did your best but couldn’t do the right thing at the right time.
As human beings we often fail to give our best effort because we are not sure what we want and why. We want to be rich, but also healthy, and also better educated and chase after higher and higher degrees. My definition would be to follow your inner self to find the things that you need to achieve your goals of success.
We don’t need to be someone else, but take pieces of everyone else into ourselves, blended together for longer term success, such as higher earning power, dignity, intellect and self-fulfillment.
My definition of success has changed a lot since I achieved what I initially considered as success.
Struggling all the way through school and later dropping out of college, I became super ambitious professionally and dedicated my life to work. I had to “make it” as soon as possible to prove to myself and others I was capable of doing something right. Slowly I started to tick all the boxes: I built my own company, made a bit of money, got a car, a nice office, a cool apartment, an amazing girlfriend, …until there were no more boxes left to check and I realized I reached that point I had been aiming for. Success, finally!
But I didn’t feel successful. I didn’t feel fulfilled. I felt worse than I ever had. There was nothing pushing me to work harder or go further anymore. I lost all drive.
After the Global Retreat, I was laying down on my bed, in a smelly hostel room in Panama City, physically and mentally drained … and for the first time, I felt fulfilled. This is when I realized that fulfillment is not something you can achieve and maintain. It’s something that comes and goes. For me it came with doing something I hadn’t had time to do before: exploring the world.
Since then, I got rid of a few of those “checked boxes” and instead am trying to design my life in a way that allows me to travel once a month to meet fascinating people across the world (often Thousanders), getting my monthly dose of fulfillment. Now success means managing to maintain that lifestyle. It’s not the destination that counts, but how much you enjoy the trip.
Share your own recipe for inner peace in the comments, and if you liked this article, please click the green heart to recommend! Stay tuned for next week’s edition on the quest for immortality.
