When I was young I used to think that success was determined by the opinion of other people. After all, it was other people telling me that it was. In order to be successful, according to them, you had to be the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most important and richest person in your social circles. If you didn't come back to your high school reunion as any of those things, you were a failure. If you couldn't do those things, then the least you could do was get married and have children and be the best wife, husband, mother, provider, christian etc in your social circle. You also had to have better stuff than your neighbors did, or your stuff had to be at least as good as theirs. All of it was based on the idea of hierarchy and divided the world up into winners and losers. You were one or the other, and your social status depended on which one you were.
As I got older, I got more and more frustrated. I had internalized the idea that we all start with the same advantages and all things being equal, I should be able to achieve what everybody else achieved and if I couldn't then I had failed. I was pretty hard on myself and so were all of the people around me who believed the same things. And we compensated by trying to impress each other with bullshit and one-upmanship. It was pretty terrible. I can see how it drives people to suicide and nervous breakdowns. Not only is the bar impossible to reach because it gets moved up every time you think you're there, but we don't all start from the same place. Not everybody is dealt a good hand in life when they come into the world. We don't have a lot of control over what we start with or what happens later on. The only area in our lives that we have any control over is how we react to things and what we make out of them. Anything outside of that is outside of our control. There's only so much that hard work alone can achieve. There's only so much we can overcome on our own, and yet we are expected to be able to succeed in spite of all of it. I recall some of the people I have known and what they had stacked against them right from the start and I imagine myself trying to succeed in their shoes. All I can think is, "Are you kidding me?". There is such a thing as an insurmountable obstacle in life, and to believe differently is to suffer from delusions. Life isn't fair, and there's no magical thinking in the world that can change that.
So anyway, I was terribly hard on myself, as I said. I beat myself up over my many failures and made myself into a nervous wreck over it. I blamed myself for everything, because at least that way I could tell myself that I had some control over what happened to me. It was better than believing that I was powerless. The problem with that was that it didn't take into account the fact that there were other people involved, or how what we do affects each other. It didn't take into account that the vast majority of life and the world and other people were outside of my control. I took personal responsibility for all of it and decided that I deserved failure and that I was a fuck-up. I had an incredibly negative internal voice that would say asshole things to me and rake me over the coals revisiting every mistake I had ever made. My inner voice was really mean. Then I started to realize whose voice it was and that originally those ways of thinking had come from my childhood influences. They were the voices of the adults who were condemning and critical of everything. Then I thought about what those peoples' lives had been like. They were never happy with anything. In fact, they were never happy. Why would I take life advice from people whose mindset hadn't led to their own happiness? Why would I talk to myself that way? I decided to change that inner voice into my own voice in place of theirs.
I'll admit, it took hitting rock bottom and having a breakdown to make me reevaluate my life. Maybe that's what it takes. I decided that if I was such a failure, maybe it didn't matter what I did and that any small improvement would be better than nothing. I started working on myself in small steps. Since I had to start over from nothing anyway, I might as well try to do it for myself this time and not for the approval of other people. I didn't bother with trying to impress anyone and accepted myself as a flawed human being but without being critical of that. I started thinking, what if I don't have to be anybody special? What if I don't have to impress anyone or be important or compete? Maybe if I can learn something new for myself I can accomplish something to be proud of. I set about learning the language for the sake of making my life a little easier. Since I wasn't doing it for someone else or because someone was making me, it had personal meaning for me. I was more motivated to do it because I was doing it for me. I didn't have the doubts and distraction of anybody else's opinion. Ironically, people were impressed. Even more ironically, I didn't care that much. I was satisfied with my own accomplishment. I felt good about it being the fruit of my own effort, something that couldn't be faked. It was all mine.
That was when I realized that success is a very personal metric. If the internal voice is never satisfied with anything, no matter what you do you will never be a success in your own eyes. Maybe happiness is being able to take satisfaction in your own accomplishments, or at least it's a part of it. Small successes count. And maybe we need to lower the bar and stop beating ourselves up for not being able to live up to an impossible standard which is a moving target on top of it. We need to set our own bar, and set it just a little higher than we can reach without stretching. I think we still need to stretch ourselves, but maybe we don't need to compete with anybody but ourselves. And maybe failure is an integral part of learning. As long as you learned something from it and tried to do better, it wasn't really a failure.
I think of it more in terms of a plant reaching for the sun. We need to grow, but it's not a competition. It's not about what anybody else thinks of you, it's about what you think of yourself. In my case, I had to readjust my goals to reality and accept that it just wasn't possible to be the best at everything and if I was going to try to be then I was going to set myself up for a lot more frustration and disappointment than life would have given me anyway. I was torturing myself for no good reason. The truth is, very few people even care. The people in your life that want you to succeed care, but the people who find fault in everything you do are people who want you to fail because it makes them feel better about themselves to have someone to look down on. Who are you going to listen to? Are you living your life for them, or are you living it for you? Are they happy? Do you want to be? Look around at the people who are happy and spend time with them. It's a lot healthier and you might figure out what their secret is through simple contact with them. You won't learn anything worth knowing from the haters. And don't try to impress them either, because you never will. You'll just put a lot of work into something they're going to tear down as soon as they see it. Pay attention to your influences, because that's what your inner voice is going to sound like.
In the end maybe what matters the most is the relationships we build and the happiness we can piece together for ourselves. That way when you come to the end of your days here on earth you can look back at the time you spent laughing with your friends or time you spent with your kids and what you accomplished that was all yours instead of how much stuff you managed to collect together in one place or how many certificates you have on the wall. You won't have spent all of your life trying to impress an invisible - and indifferent audience. If you can help someone else along, all the better, because we all need help and encouragement sometimes. Maybe it'll come back to you, maybe it won't, but a kind word doesn't cost you anything. When I think back now I remember the kind words were what kept me going. Life is a collective effort, not a competition.
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