Redefining Success

What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?

The idea of “having it all” is not just impossible, it’s undesirable. Why should we want it all? Everything we carry has weight, and lucky are we if our burdens are light.

Everything we carry has weight, and lucky are we if our burdens are light.

What we need is to redefine what makes a life successful. It’s not money, degrees, accolades, or the accoutrements associated with the accumulation of wealth and prestige. It’s not someone looking at your corpse in a funeral parlor and exclaiming, “Wow, they had it all!” Let them say of us not, “Look at what they did,” but “Look at who they were.”

Success is looking in the mirror and saying, “I have everything I need.” Success is being surrounded by people you love and spending time with them every day. Success is sipping your coffee and watching the sunrise unhurried. Success is forgetting what day it is and not needing to care. Success is reading a book you’ve always wanted to read or watching a film that connects you with people who have been dead for a long time and being moved to tears. Success is eating the chocolate cake and not tainting the sweetness with guilt. Success is saying no until you’re heard. Success is being home.

Success is eating the chocolate cake and not tainting the sweetness with guilt.

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Quote for the Day: March 31st, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content License. Image Credit: CDD20

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

Quote for the Day: March 30th, 2024

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein, German-born physicist and recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics

Quote for the Day: March 29th, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content License. Image Credit: Pexels

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

Quote for the Day: March 28th, 2024

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

Quote for the Day: March 26th, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content License. Image Credit: Lenalensen

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc.

Quote for the Day: March 25th, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content License. Image Credit: nickpanek620

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid activist and first president of South Africa from 1994-1999

Quote for the Day: March 24th, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content License. Image Credit: Aurélien-Barre

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I need to make a confession: I lied to one of my high school teachers about reading Les Misérables all the way through about twelve years ago and it’s haunted me ever since. I’m going to get through it this year, I swear.

Quote for the Day: March 23rd, 2024

Free for use under the Pixabay Content license. Image credit: JillWellington

Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?
from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, in her poetry collection Dream Work

“Wild Geese” was one of the first poems by Mary Oliver that I ever encountered, and I’ve been a disciple of hers ever since. She exists in my mind among the world’s greatest writers, living or dead (she passed away in 2019). I carry the words of “Wild Geese” always in my heart, as an urgent reminder of not just my mortality but my own unique aliveness. There are things we are all given to do, and if one is really lucky (my mother hates the word lucky, so for her I will leave the word blessed here), they’re allowed to share what they’ve been given to others. This is the sole purpose and the grand design of all artistic creation.

There are things we are all given to do, and if one is really lucky (my mother hates the word lucky, so for her I will leave the word blessed here), they’re allowed to share what they’ve been given to others. This is the sole purpose and the grand design of all artistic creation.

I just realized the poem I pulled today’s quote from talks about geese and the picture I’ve provided is of a tit. I think I’ll let it stand.

Quote for the Day: November 25th, 2022

I curated my life to be an expression of my pain. By creating somebody that I felt was stronger than me.
Lady Gaga

I love this quote by Lady Gaga. A lot of people look at her art and life and see only the glamor and artifice they associate with this persona she’s created over her career. What they don’t realize is that many people who lead creative lives, who create art as a means of survival, who depend on it for their living, channel everything they have into their art. So you’re not just getting the joy and the wonder that all of us who are blessed enough to spend time on this planet enjoy, but you’re also getting the trauma and the deeply-held secrets and the pain — so much pain — that we mask and subsume otherwise we’d never leave our rooms again.

I think art forces us to be braver. It forces us to become the best versions of ourselves that we can be. And in the times we can’t be that best version, when we can’t take the high road, when we have to forego that dream of something better, it forces us to look that in the eye — and that in itself is a gift.