ScottMcLeod.com

I must be doing something right.

Friday at work I found out I've been given an office for the remaining three weeks of my work term. Someone came by to move my stuff from my old cubicle to new office Friday afternoon. The office certainly affords more privacy and space than my cube but more importantly lends me an air of status I didn't previously have.

Err...I'll level with you: I was moved because a new full-timer started today and he wasn't about to be given an office. Sets bad precedent, ya know? So they gave it to a co-op instead. I'm not sure if that's better but I'm not complaining.

I had an encounter with an elderly gentleman yesterday that led me to consider how I do in fact define success in my life.

I was in a mall bookstore perusing the new releases when a gravelly voice asked, "How do you define success?" I turned and the speaker was an elderly man sitting on his walker. He was in pretty rough shape: walker, hunched, sores covering his face, mottled hands. I took in his condition and grunted some weak response while inching away. He indicated a book he was holding, a hardcover marked down in price written by some attractive "expert" (pictured on the cover, of course), about finding success in your life.

I thought he may have been a touch senile and initially wanted to move on but as he spoke I decided to be polite and hear him out. He began by relating to me how he never was or will be a millionaire and that those who define success by such measures, such as the book he was holding, mislead themselves. He went on to describe how he was forced quit school and work to support his mother; join the army and go to war; lose his best friend in the war; find and marry a nice girl, as he phrased it; then lose both his wife, after 58 years of marriage, and two daughters; and finally that he now lives alone and has no one to talk to. He managed to patch together his life story.

I believe the message he wanted to get across was that he had learned long ago to define success in his life by other measures than financial success.

Which led me to ponder how I define success in my own life. I highly value things in life, the most important being my personal and family's health. But that isn't success, is it? I try to be a good person according to the image I have of what a good person should be. Again, not success.

Well, I presently think of my life as successful if each facet of it -- family, friends, school, work -- is successful on its own. Subconsciously or not, I keep these somewhat separate from the others and I think this allows me to turn to one when another struggles. Are such divisions naturally created by most people? I'd imagine they are. Perhaps those whose personal and professional lives are tightly interwoven have trouble escaping one for the other. Everyone needs a sanctuary, somewhere to turn when something else has gone wrong.

Each of these parts of my life I believed I consider successful through different measures. One immediately considers marks the yardstick for measuring success at school. At work, a person's salary or position within the company could define their success there. These are true to an extent. But I have come to realize that it is the relationships I have in my life that truly make me feel good about it or not. A serious rift between a classmate or co-worker and I would upset me more than doing poorly on an exam or failing to solve some technical issue at work. It is the relationships between myself and my family and friends that bring me happiness in life and what I've learned is my true measure of success.