What is Success?

How do you answer the question..."Success is...?" The problem for most people who want to be successful is not that they can't achieve success. The main hurdle for them is that they misunderstand success. Success can have many different faces. Maltbie Babcock said, "One of the most common mistakes and one of the costliest is thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic, something or other which we do not possess."

So what is success? What does success look like? Most people have a vague picture of what it means to be a successful person.

Most individuals equate success with money. Nothing wrong with that. More power to you if you are skilled with such success. But if that's your only definition of success then you might not have the best of definitions. Through the ages, great men have taught that wealth and what it brings are at best fleeting. Everyone enters the world with nothing and exits with the same amount.

For example, in 1923, a small group of the world's wealthiest men met at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. They were the "Who's Who" of wealth and power. At that time, they controlled more money than the total amount contained in the United States Treasury. Here is a list of who was there and what eventually happened to them:

*Charles Schwab - president of the largest independent steel company...died broke.

*Arthur Cutten - greatest of the wheat speculators...died abroad, insolvent.

*Richard Witney - president of New York Stock Exchange... died just after his release from Sing Sing prison.

*Albert Fall - member of U.S. president's cabinet...was pardoned from prison so that he could die from home.

*Jes Livermore - greatest "bear" on Wall Street...committed suicide.

*Leon Fraser - president of Bank of International Settlements...committed suicide.

*Ivar Kreuger - head of the world's greatest monopoly...committed suicide.

Even Greek millionaire Aristotle Onassis who retained his wealth and died at a ripe old age, recognized that money isn't the same as success. Onassis maintained that "after you reach a certain point, money becomes unimportant. What matters is success."

So what is it in life that inspires you to be successful? How can you achieve it? Who needs to be involved with your pursuit?

Whenever I used a tool from my grandfather's work shed, or his lawnmower, his fishing tackle, whatever it was I can hear him say..."just make sure you put it back better than you found it."
Given that thought, maybe we can each measure how successful we are if we use our lives and talents to make our individual worlds better as we've live in them.