The definition of success varies enormously from person to person. Everyone has a personal version of it, shaped by their own interests and priorities.
In modern society, though, we usually apply the word to someone who has progressed favorably in a job or a business — whoever has collected the most recognition, academic, social or political. Whoever has accumulated possessions and projects an established image.
And in the age of social media, people spend their days trying to reflect back whatever they take to be a sign of success: the wonderful family, the incredible holiday, the achievements. It is a composition of self-image, and it frequently has very little to do with the reality underneath it.
The part nobody can see
It is very likely that the true sense of success has little to do with the external reality we perceive. Our perception of things is always limited to the fragments we are able to see, without ever really registering what sits below the tip of the iceberg.
Which means that at its most essential, the sense of success is individual rather than social. It is a matter of how we feel about what we have achieved, set against what we still want to achieve. That comparison happens entirely in private, and no photograph reaches it.
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
— Frederic William Farrar
A more useful definition
A number of writers have defined success along two lines:
- Mastery of oneself
- Helping others
And from those, four characteristics that let us reach it:
- The ability to manage your own mental states.
- Knowing what people need — and in particular, what you need.
- Knowing how to perceive and communicate from another point of view.
- The ability to focus, to learn, and to practice what you have learned.
From this perspective, personal success is reaching the highest point of your own capacities. It is developing your aptitudes fully and becoming the best version of yourself — the realization of your potential.
And once that is developed, sharing with others whatever part of it might be useful to them.
Notice that neither half of that is visible from outside, and neither can be taken from you by a change in circumstances. That is most of the argument for preferring it.