How do you measure success? Do you measure it by the number in the bank account? By your place in the business hierarchy? By your location in a certain social circle? By how many lives you’ve touched in a positive manner?
I think too many of us measure success in a financial or social placement manner. I can’t say I’m innocent, but at the end of the day, is it really about who has the most toys? The most friends? The biggest bank account? The biggest office? If we measure success in such ways aren’t we missing some fundamentally more important things in life? It makes me think about the song “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin. It’s too easy to miss out on the really important thing because we are too focused on the less important ones and tell ourselves it’s OK because what we are trying to achieve is for future benefit. But do we look too far in the future and miss the present because we are so busy trying to keep up with the Jones’?
I’m not into greater meanings in life, but I do think there are more important things than making the next rung on the corporate ladder, than making a fortune, than having the most publications…. I’d like to think I’ve made some small difference in someone’s life, I’d like to think that I have helped one or two people in some small way achieve their goals. There was no movie that I think impacted me more in the past ten years than Pay it Forward. We get so concerned with ourselves and with repaying those who help us so that we are not in their debt that we forget to think about others. To think beyond ourselves. I’d love to think that if I helped someone out, they would appreciate that assistance and help someone else out when a need arose.
I have struggled with the issue of “What I should be doing” vs “What I want to do” for a long time. When you go to University and fight all the way through to a successful PhD, society seems to assume that you will either become some significant researcher, or a professor. But what if those things aren’t of interest at the end of it all. It is still an achievement to have actually completed the thing. My father was disappointed with me after the BSc, and after the MSc. After both of those degrees he kept on me to get an accounting degree because he thought I should be making six figures after all that schooling. He never really understood that I would be happier at a lower paying job as long as I enjoyed doing it. So in my terms, success is not measured financially.
I visited with a friend yesterday afternoon. She is struggling financially and she has a friend who married a very wealthy man about a year ago. At one point her eyes welled up with tears and she wondered when life was going to get easier and why she couldn’t find someone out there. I didn’t have the answer for her. She is well respected in what she does, but she just can’t seem to get ahead and it seems unfair.
I once had a woman ask me when I was going to have children (obviously not recently!) and when I said never, she expressed horror and looked straight down her nose at me and said she felt sorry for me. Interesting. Apparently her measure of success involved reproducing. To be honest, if she stuck around and had not snubbed me after that, she would have learned that I don’t look down on women who have chosen family over career. Quite the opposite, I think they have a strength and fortitude that is not in me. I haven’t the strength of character to change diapers, deal with sick children, be consoling to a small child when I have my own frustrations, to basically put aside myself and pour all of my energy and love into that little one. No, Motherhood is the epitome of the job scale and anyone who thinks his/her career takes more personal energy than being a mother. I may be married at long last, but I am in a partnership. Married with children represents a far more complex social structure than I am capable of navigating.
And yet, sadly, women are caught in a paradox. If a woman chooses to not have children she has not fulfilled her biological role and some people may regard her as a failure. But if she does have children and chooses to forgo her career to raise her children, she might have an internal conflict and feelings of failure because she didn’t reach her career goals. And those women who try to do both, inevitably feel that they are not managing to do either in a competent manner and have therefore failed on both counts. How does that make any sense?
Success is difficult to measure and everyone uses a different scale. Wouldn’t life be simpler if there was one scale that we could all measure ourselves against? Or maybe that would be worse…I’m not sure.
About the time I was finishing my PhD thesis I came upon a fascinating article. It was timely…. it was called Feeling Like a Fraud… and makes for interesting reading.