the difference between success and satisfaction

By L. J. Brown, November 2023

I am sure that I still have lots to learn during my working years of life, but having just passed the mid-career stage of my journey what I have gained has taken on greater value and meaning for this stage of my personal and professional life.  As I completed my first college degree the idea of success loomed large over all of the hopes I had for myself.  I believed that being successful would solve the majority of concerns I had and all of the challenges I was faced with as a young person.  For me, success inevitably meant gainful employment, having some of the things that I wished for—most of which were material—and also being able to have experiences that I could not afford while I was in college.  Things like travel, leisure time (Ha Ha), and options.

I continue to strive for all of these things, but it is the last one that I now see as the true reason that I was so motivated to be successful.  Having options meant that just about every other thing I hoped for as a young adult was a possibility.  Now having options means that I am less likely to have to force myself to do things that I may not want to do or may not be ready to do or in many cases just may not have accepted as the best approach.  I have begun to feel that my success is almost antithetical to this last group of criteria that I believed were accessories of success.  I have less time for travel with my busy schedule and most of my time is occupied with work, so leisure time is still somewhat of a false hope.  And I often feel that the only option I have is to keep climbing.

Coming to the realization that success does not always equal satisfaction, I now see far more clearly that what I value above all else is meeting my own expectations.  So much of getting a thing accomplished comes with far too many of the things one does not bargain for along the way.  If I had more awareness of what contentment means to me at the beginning of my professional years I would have followed a path that allowed me to travel while working (which I made a wayward attempt to do), that would give me the maximum amount of options as I approached mid-career (because it sometimes takes doing things that you do not want to do to spark a notion of what might align with personal goals), and then being very determined about making more time for leisure at the first opportunity afforded.  I see now that getting up those first rungs of the ladder put me on a conveyor belt that led me to success with little satisfaction.  All of this is not to say that success in and of itself is unrewarding.  It is just that success does not always meet the needs and/or expectations that one might find fulfilling.