What Does Success Mean to You?

Recently, NHL hockey star Ilya Kovalchuk turned down a contract offer of $101,000,000 (that’s a hundred and one million dollars) over 12 years.  His team, the Atlanta Thrashers, had no other option: they traded him. (Source: MSNBC)

If he had accepted the contract, it would have made him the highest paid player in the NHL, generally considered the top hockey league in the world. So far in his NHL tenure, he has won the Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard Trophy, played in three all-star games, and scored a total of 328 goals. (For those of you counting, that would work out to about $187,000 per goal if he played another 12 years at his current pace.) I wonder, given all of this, whether Kovalchuk considers himself a “success”?

I guess we’d have to ask him how he defines success. Certainly he is one of the top players in the top hockey league in the world. But he has yet to win hockey’s ultimate prize, the Stanley Cup. If he wins that most coveted award, will he then be a “success”?

What about you? How do you define “success”? Are you successful in your life? How do you know?

Author Rusty Wright notes in his article “How to Be Successful and Satisfied” that “Success in one area does not guarantee satisfaction in life. You can reach all your goals and still not be at peace with yourself. How can you both achieve your goals and be satisfied?” Similarly, a great religious teacher once asked a similar question to his friends: “What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?” Both hint at the slippery quality of success. As soon as you become successful, you realize that rather than reaching the top of the mountain, there is always farther to climb … and the higher you climb, the farther you risk falling (as a certain very public figure named Tiger found out recently).

Do you agree with Wright’s keys to success? And how do you define what success means?

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