How to Know You are Staring Success in the Face as You Look in the Mirror
There are an infinite number of ways to define success. If you ask 50 people to define success, you will get 50 different answers. Correspondingly, success is a lot like beauty as it’s in the eye of the beholder. But even though it’s in the eye of the beholder, there is one common thread between both success and beauty that remains the same for everyone.
What’s on the inside matters just as much as what’s on the outside.
Therefore, even though someone may look successful from the outside looking in, only the people who know them closely know if that person is truly successful. Moreover, the most important person who knows you is you!
So, although you may have all the trappings of success, when you look in the mirror you know the truth about what’s inside you and how you feel. As renowned Army veteran, entrepreneur, author and current Maryland gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore states in his book “The Work”:
One thing I began to realize in my travels was that everyone I met who was truly successful–whether in business, in philanthropic work, in human rights, in government, or in raising a family–shared one common trait: they were fanatically passionate about the work they did. They breathed it. They needed it. It was their lifeblood.
Moore’s insight is how you know when you have truly found success in life. Yes, there are trappings of success that both you and society expects as a baseline. After that however, you must be “fanatically” passionate about your life’s work before you can say you have crossed the finish line.
This is not to say both the expectations of success materially and the feeling of success internally must come from the same source. Indeed, a day job can be the conduit for a separate passion. That’s success as well. Either way, it’s a fundamental truth that there is still work to be done towards your success until you look yourself in the mirror and have that feeling of being fanatically passionate about your life.