Changing My Perspective of Success

If you were to ask me, “what is your definition of success?” For a long time, I would have given the answer of being successful as having lots of money, having a big house, being famous, being liked, having a lot of followers on social media, or being respected. It most likely has some of these or all of these.

My Previous Perspective of Success

I was in the category of people that viewed success as having expensive material possessions, having a lot of women, and being famous. I am not quite sure how it is that I even got this perspective. Maybe I was watching too much television that glorified having a lot of money, a big house, and a lot of women. Maybe it was just my ignorance of what the real world was like. Maybe it was who I was around at my school and the things that others saw as important started to become important to me as well. Maybe I should not blame other outside forces for my perspective and take responsibility for my own way of thinking. However I look at it at the end of the day, it is my responsibility to analyze my actions, my way of thinking, and challenge myself constantly to think about things in a different way. Especially with me growing up and seeing how skewed my perspective was from a kid to my young adulthood.

My Current Perspective of Success

Now that I am in my late 20’s I have started to really analyze what it is that I find important in my life. From my family to friends, my way of thinking, others’ way of thinking, and the list goes on and on. There are a lot of things that I have found about the way that I was doing things in life that do not align with the type of person that I am wanting to become in the future. With my current perspective of success, I feel that success is different for everyone. There is a kind of a universal mindset still of success as having a lot of money, a big house, or whatever other material possessions that we place value on. And when I say value I don’t mean a dollar amount, I am talking about placing more of a mental value. Even for the celebrities, I no longer see them as successful, and I don’t mean that in a bad way or that they don’t mean anything. What I mean by that is, for those individuals, they have to decide for themself if they are successful or not. No one else can decide for them if they are or not. The real question is, can someone who is homeless and broke be successful? In my eyes, they can be. They don’t have to have a nickel to their name and I will still deem them as successful. It sounds weird I know, it is just the way that my thinking is. Maybe I am wrong with this way of thinking. I may even change my perspective of what success is in some years. As I said earlier, I am constantly challenging my way of thinking and trying to come up with better ideas.

Conclusion

One of the biggest things that I hope that others take away from this is just to do your own thinking when it comes to things. Throw out what you think that you know and really start from scratch about everything. I threw out everything I thought I knew a couple of years ago and started to come up with my own conclusion on everything. I try to let others influence my thinking. Even though it still does happen sometimes. When it does happen, I try to step back and really think if I came up with the conclusion myself or if someone came up with it for me. Kind of like the movie Inception. There are also those who will come to the same conclusion as myself. I try not to live in that space of just reading, listening, or seeing things that only reiterate what I already think. I try to view things that are different from my own way of thinking so that I can really ask myself if it is something that I truly believe or is just something that others believe and I just agree with them.