What is Success?

I'm interested in discovering, what does each person define as success?

By the way, when I say success, I refer to the necessary proof for happiness to exist.

I've talked to business people, engineers, philosophers, lots of different types. And each response is different. I've noticed some interesting patterns...

For instance, business folk tend to say that success is making alot of money. It may also be starting up a business or getting a great job. It could be learning enough to be great at what you do. Generally, their sense of happiness and achievement comes, you guessed it, business.

Engineers find their success in the creation of a great new device, or structure, or organization, generally, when something has reached completion with time and focus, the feeling of achievement is success.

Philosophers have the most interesting responses. Here is what philosophers say success is...

• Discovering the ultimate answers in life.
  
• Understanding the minds of those before them.
  
• Achieved by helping to change the thoughts of all naive people.
  
• Eliminating our own naivity.
  
• Well, there is no goal to achieve, you cant believe you've achieved it because your senses can fool you.
  
• An effect of something you dont control, therefore happiness has no grounds to exist.
  
• Just to name a few. There are some confusingly unfathomable entangled answers I've heard.

So across all these definitions of what success is, who is right? Is there only one right way? Could multiples be right? Could even they all be right?

They all might be right, but does knowing what success is make them successful? No.

Infact, most people I talk to aren't happy and successful, by their very own defintions. Why is that?

You know what I think it is...

By a raise of hands, who here can just be happy? Without a reason at all. Just be happy, right now, let it flood your body and permiate your surroundings. Open up and expand yourself into happiess, feeling joy and warmth from within your chest, feeling a buzzing radiating outwards in every direction. You know, being happy.

Wait, you did know you can do that at any moment, without needing a reason first... you just forgot you knew. But you remember now.

So, even though you may know what success is, and what to be/do/have/know to be successful... Be sure to spend right now, as often as possible, just being happy, without reason.

You'll find more happiness in your life. And it came from right there, inside yourself...