I was recently chatting with a friend about parenting, and somewhere in the conversation I said something like, "I mean, as parents, we're just doing our best to set our kids up for success…however you want to define that."
I add qualifiers like that a lot. Sometimes I catch myself doing it and wonder if it comes across as long-winded, or unsure, or overly complicated (it probably does sometimes). I keep doing it because I've become aware of how many assumptions we make about other people, and how narrowly we tend to define words like success.
The traditional version is obvious - finances, home, relationships, maybe a social following now, all the things we're taught to strive for. And when someone doesn't want that version, or wants a different shape of it, they can end up feeling like there's something wrong with them.
Both of us paused after I said it because the natural next question that came was - how do we define success? And what do we want to teach our kids about it?
The end goal used to be happiness
For a long time, I thought happiness was the end goal. I was genuinely obsessed with understanding what actually made people happy - I read the research, read the books, took the courses, the whole thing. A lot of what comes up is still true.
Beyond a certain income (the often-cited studies land somewhere around $75,000-$105,000 USD depending on year and country) past which additional income doesn't meaningfully move day-to-day happiness. Relationships matter enormously - the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its ninth decade, has consistently found that the quality of your close relationships predicts long-term wellbeing more than almost anything else. Meaningful work, autonomy, a sense of purpose - all of that shows up in the data.
As I began to dig through this, what was missing for me, was the how. How do you actually get to the things that make you happy? Because you can know that relationships matter and still not have the ones you want. You can know that meaningful work matters and still be doing work that doesn't feel like yours.
The how, I've come to think, comes down to becoming the person you want to become. Not the person you were told to become, or the one that fits neatly into the traditional definition of success - the person you actually want to be.
Which requires looking at the defaults - all the things society and family have told you to want - and asking whether they're actually yours. That's the piece that was missing when I was thinking of happiness as an end goal. Happiness isn't something you arrive at. It's what happens when you're becoming someone who you’d be really proud of.
To be clear…
I want to be clear that I don't think wanting the traditional version of success is wrong. If someone genuinely wants the big financial success, the beautiful home, the social media worthy moments - go for it. Truly. It's not the wanting that's the problem. The problem, I think, is if you had to become someone you didn't want to be in order to become that version of success.
That's the line, at least the one I've been able to draw so far.
I've had to work through a lot of this in my own life. On paper, I have a lot of the traditional markers - a good career, a home, a family, a kid, the ability to travel. But the through-line for me has been noticing where I started to question things along the way, and sometimes even after I got them.
Take the doctor part. I trained as a doctor, but I already knew I thought about health differently, so I became a naturopathic doctor instead of going into conventional medicine. From there, I could have gone into full-time patient care and skipped the teaching, and I probably would have made more money that way. But I loved teaching, so I kept it.
Then somewhere along the way I got into brand and marketing work, partly because I love it and I'm reasonably good at it, and partly because time flexibility became a real priority at this stage of life with a young kid. Could I leave the doctoring world entirely now and go fully into marketing and probably make more money? Probably. But…
I still like doctoring and I still love teaching, and the happy medium that worked out really well, (and sometimes feels a bit like cheating because it worked out so well), is teaching in the teaching clinic, because I get to be a doctor and a teacher at the same time. And I'm not ashamed to say that stability has something to do with it too. My child is still young.
Then there's the wanting-nice-things part. I did want them and had them for a while. Something shifted though. I remember looking at a particular handbag - genuinely beautiful, meticulously made, expensive - and thinking through what it would actually mean to own it. I thought so much about it that I called my friends to send pics and talk about it (haha, yes, I'm that person).
And…it would be hard to keep well. If it got damaged and I had to replace it, that would feel like a waste. Somewhere underneath all that the real thought was that I could do so many things with my daughter for the cost of that bag, and I don't actually have to have it.
Someone could argue that if I had enough money, I wouldn't have to weigh those things against each other. Fair. But I also know that getting to that much money comes with its own set of trade-offs, and I've thought about what those trade-offs might ask of me and who I'd have to become to get there. I don't want to become that version of me. That's a statement about me, not about anyone who's made a different call.
So what do we tell our kids?
If we were going to redefine success, I'd want it to be something less narrow than the version we were handed - something that leaves room for the traditional markers, or a specific shape of them, or none of them at all, depending on what actually fits.
The conversation with my friend ended with another pause, because really, there's no neat and tidy answer here. When has there ever been, especially with abstract things like success and parenting? For now, I try to explain to a six-year-old that success can mean many things, but mommy thinks it might mean becoming the person you want to become.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
If we define success as a destination, we keep chasing the next one. If we define it as a becoming, we don't chase, we explore.