How do you measure Success?
First, I’m not going to define “Success” specifically, since I think that, in some ways, my question is “What is Success?”, or perhaps “What do you think Success is?”
In general though, I am talking about overall personal success, so the question involves something like “How successful is a person’s life?”
To clarify my question:
Assuming that there are “levels” or “degrees” of success, then, given two persons, and assuming that they don’t have identical “levels” of success, is there a way that you can determine who is more successful, and if yes, how?
Also, assuming that there are ways of measuring success, are there better and worse (“proper/improper”?) ways of measuring success?
To me, some of the issues are:
Definitions of success: individual/group, basic/advanced, empirical/ideological
Simple (simplistic?) definitions: Being alive, being healthy, having family, having friends, having love, being happy, being rich, having power
Types of success: physical, spiritual, emotional, social, financial
Is prosperity (in a broad sense) the same as success?
Are external measures of success meaningful?
Is measuring success intrinsically subjective?
Is an individual’s measure of his/her success the ultimate measure of personal success?
In a society, can personal success be purely individual, or does it necessarily involve others?
For what it’s worth, as I get older and learn more about myself and about life, I realize that success involves the process of getting older and learning more about myself and about life —learning what’s important to me and to people that I care about deeply, and, along the way, becoming wiser and happier.