What is success?

A deceptively simple question -- and perhaps one of the most contested ones in human experience.

Here are a few ways to think about it:

The conventional definition -- achieving goals, accumulating wealth, status, recognition, and influence -- is the version most of us inherit without choosing. It's externally defined and constantly shifts the goalpost.

The philosophical view tends to ask: success for whom, and according to what? Aristotle called it eudaimonia -- flourishing -- which is less about achieving and more about living in alignment with your deepest nature and virtues.

The existential view pushes further: success might simply be the experience of having fully shown up for your own life -- making choices that are genuinely yours, not borrowed from expectation or fear.

The Eastern view -- particularly from Vedanta and similar traditions -- questions the premise altogether. If the self doing the achieving is itself an illusion, what is there to succeed at? The goal becomes liberation from the chase itself.

And then there is a quieter definition: success as alignment -- when what you do, how you live, and what you value are all pointing in the same direction. No performance. No gap between the inner and outer life.

The interesting thing is that most people feel unsuccessful not because they have achieved too little, but because they are living someone else's definition of the word.

So perhaps the real question is not what is success -- but whose definition are you living by, and did you ever choose it?