What means success?
The latest article of Sahil Lavingia explains how he failed to make Gumroad a billion dollar company, and how changing his definition of success made him realize that he is actua
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These are great questions. I've definitely felt some tension between ambition and productivity on one side vs contentment on the other.
That was a good article!
Thanks for sharing. I like the new added dimension of tension between ambition and productivity and contentment. I too struggle with that from time to time.
I like to keep it simple so for me, success means spending the least amount of time doing the things I don't like. Sometimes this coincides with wealth, the millionaire who enjoys buying businesses compared to the 9-5 employee who hates his job. But I'd also consider my cousin successful who lives off $3000 a month reviewing x-rays for an hour a day and watches sports the rest of the day since that's what he would rather do than be an entrepreneur. He could make 5 times more than that if he worked an 8 hour day and being on a hospital staff but it's not worth his happiness.
Success is really nothing more than the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. This means that any person who knows what they are doing and where they are going is a success. Any person with a goal towards which they are working is a successful person.”
Earl Nightingale
I like that quote. Is that independent of whether they will achieve it? I mean, thinking more about what it means to be successful, I think the time component is relevant as well. For some of my goals, I do the best I can right now to potential achieve them. But, I will only know later wether I’ll be/was/am successful or not... 🤔
In my view the means of success is freedom. Working on whatever you want whenever you want is the best success one can achieve.
That’s what I have set as my ultimate goal!
Basically what you are saying is that you evaluate your success against your goal, so if your goals are low enough you can always be successful. A homeless person can have the goal to eat once a day and reach it, but I would never consider him successful.
People can lie to themselves on a surface level, but deep down they know the truth. I believe that if you aren't fulfilling your potential, if you aren't doing things that make you uncomfortable and if you don't push to improve every day, you can't and probably shouldn't feel successful, because you could be a lot more and you know it. You can't feel proud about something if you feel that you could have done 10x better.
I'm not talking about business in particular, I'm talking life in general.
His point (buried at a random point in the long article) is that he failed to reach his narrow goal but realized that what he built has many facets and some of them were a "success":
He set the target very high but maybe he should have set it at $100 million, which doesn't look all that different from the ground level on day 1. His picking $1 billion was an arbitrary target dictated by the current state of our outlier-focused tech media.
Aa small percentage of business people derive an insane amount of pleasure and satisfaction from the processes of running their business. For everyone else, it's a healthy mental development to realize that there's more to life than money. Or any singular "X" in general.
I wasn't talking about the article, but about the fellow indie hacker point.
In particular this point "Personally, for me, I feel successful even though my side projects make no money. I feel successful because my current goal is to spend time with my family, do something I love, and be able to afford my current lifestyle".
I believe that a business that makes no money can't be considered successful. Sure, you can be happy doing what you love but still, there are objective requirements to evaluate success. In the case of business, revenue and profit are minimum requirements.
Not all businesses that are profitable are successful, but no business that makes zero money is successful. Again, I don't believe that money is the only thing that matters in life, but in business making money is a minimum requirement to be successful.
I guess what I am trying to say is that when it comes to success there are objective requirements to meet. When it comes to happiness, it's totally subjective.
Agreed. Business success is measured by revenue. The OP and the article should have discussed contentment and satisfaction, but those words can seem foreign when we spend our time in the business world, where the main word is 'success'. A business that is losing money can be classified as a hobby and hobbies bring people various satisfactions.
Well, I did never call my side projects a business, to begin with. Second, if i would consider it a business I would not call it a successful business. What I said is that I feel successful in pursuing my side projects in the way I do it, even though they make me no money.
BTW: A business that losing money is very likely a business. There are tones of very real businesses that lose money every day. Is it successful? Probably not in most definition. But it could be. Facebook and others did not make money for a long time.
That's a very interesting take on what I wrote.
Your interpretation of my writing that goals should be low enough to achieve them isn't at all what I meant. I meant that your goals should be true to yourselves. And that this can be completely different from what success means to another person.
Apart from that, I actually think that we both agree. Because, if your goal is to "fulfill your potential" and that means for you "push to improve every day", then that's a great personal success metric. If you aren't lying to yourself. If you aren't doing that to impress others. And then again, what you achieve with this improvement and the push, is again deeply personal.
So, I believe it is utterly important to look deep down into yourself to find out the truth. And then, pursue that dream. But also to make sure you are happy along the way. We only have one life.
"Your interpretation of my writing that goals should be low enough to achieve them isn't at all what I meant".
That's not what I wanted to say. You said that you feel successful because you are meeting your current goal. "Personally, for me, I feel successful even though my side projects make no money. I feel successful because my current goal is to spend time with my family, do something I love, and be able to afford my current lifestyle".
I meant that meeting your goals is not enough for being successful. Being true to yourself and being happy are subjective things, successful is something more objective.
While the individual definition can vary, you can say when something isn't successful. A business that makes no money isn't successful. A person that works for minimum wage isn't professionally successful. He can be happy and true to himself, but still, he isn't professionally successful. A person with no friends and family is not successful when it comes to personal relationships.
You can say that a person who makes lots of money or has friends and family but is miserable is not successful. And I agree with this take. But for me, success has an objective measure that can't be ignored.
Thanks for your take on it. Interesting to read what being successful means to you.