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Hogback Trail, Canon City, CO. Photo: Philip Sterling
Possibly the most important Over a Beer column that I wrote for Singletracks was titled, “How do you define success?” In it, I was earnestly seeking to understand how Singletracks readers define success in their own lives, but the piece fell pretty flat with the audience.
It has struck me more than once that earnestness doesn’t necessarily go over well with most mountain bikers, and this particular column only drove that point home. Ok, there were a handful of great responses—some from friends that I respect and admire—and for those, I am immensely grateful.
This idea of success has been stuck in my craw ever since then (almost a year now), because it strikes me as an interesting and critically important question. It is a question that each and every one of us must answer for ourselves. We must choose how we define success.
Of course, you could choose to abdicate your decision and let someone else define success for you. Perhaps you listen to a news pundit that defines success along their political or ideological lines, and you buy in wholeheartedly. Perhaps you listen to a politician and buy their definition of success. Or perhaps you’re convinced by a rich businessman or famous author. Or maybe you read a religious text that espouses a definition of success and because everyone in your circle of influence subscribes to it, you buy into that definition instead.
If we adopt someone else’s definition of success, I’m afraid that it will never hold the same kind of core foundational power, motivation, or become the driving force in our lives that it could be if we instead chose to do the work to define success for ourselves. In order to form some sort of core belief on this topic, I personally believe that we should all sit down and think about success and say, “Ok, all of these people define success in these various ways. What do I believe, and most importantly, why?”
At the end of the day, whether or not we become “successful,” whether or not we are happy with our lives and the progress we’re making—these evaluations come down to the metrics that we’re using, the goalposts and mile markers that we’re measuring against. If we’ve chosen the wrong goalposts, the wrong definition of success, we’ll never be successful.
Or perhaps worse: we’ll be “successful” at completely wrong and ultimately, utterly meaningless things.
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