How to define successful?

I’m always question myself “how am i become a succesful man?”. Honestly, I do not need many money for myself. But, yet MONEY is so important for a MAN. You want to have a nice girlfriend? then please get yourself more money. No matter how good you are, how nice you is, if you do not have enough amount of money, you will still have a lot of friend, but you will hardly to get a “dream” girlfriend. AM I RIGHT? I don’t know, I don’t want to believe this is true. But, what i see and observe around, a sense of security can never make sense without MONEY! Okay, this just what I feel….

Let’s read this article posted on Daily Blog Tips:

Obviously I don’t think there is right or wrong as to how we define success. The term itself is a subjective thing, so what success means to you might be different from what it means to me or other people, and this is perfectly fine.

That being said, I think it is useful to discuss about such definitions, because it helps us to analyze whether or not we are moving in the right direction.

For example, most people tend to equate success with money. That is, the more money you make, the more successful you are. But under this definition one could argue that a drug dealer who makes millions of dollars annually is a very successful person. I don’t agree with this. I could give you that such drug dealer is a savvy businessman, but I wouldn’t call him successful, because the impact he has on the life of other people is actually a very negative one. The same thing could be said about online spammers, scammers and so on.

Now take Linus Torvalds as another example. He is the founder of the Linux movement, which created one of the most successful open source projects to date, and enabled millions of people to use a free and very reliable operating system. I am not sure how rich he is, but even if he was broke I would call him a successful person, because he had a huge impact on the lives of people from around the world.

Note that these things are not mutually exclusive either. In other words, it is possible to make a lot of money and have a positive impact in the lives of many people at the same time (and often times they go together). Just think about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergei Brin.

But, I suspect that these folks were first and foremost motivated by the possibility of making something big that would impact many people. As Steve Jobs say, by the possibility of putting a dent in the universe. Sure, they were no philanthropists, so the money was welcome too, but I don’t think it was the only nor the main thing they were pursuing.

Which leads us to one question: are you working to make as much money as possible, or to make as big an impact as possible?

Agreed…?!?!?! Whatever, I just wish everyone stay happiness and the world is peaceful~ : )