What Does Success Really Mean?

Having a Ferrari and a mansion doesn’t always mean you’re successful. Andrew Hallam unpacks what real success looks like — and how life satisfaction is at the core of it.

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One of the things I found fascinating when it comes to just trying to identify what success really meant and how the notion of success I felt was so one dimensional and that in many cases wrong. And so I’ll just say like the popular notion of success.

So you ask somebody like, uh, or somebody might say, oh, that she’s really successful because she has, she drives a Ferrari, she’s head of her law firm and she’s got a mansion on the hill. And, and I remember thinking like, well, maybe she’s successful. In a broader holistic sense, but that only define one part.

So does she laugh? Is she happy? Is she healthy? Does she have good relationships? Whenever we wanna pursue anything, and this is one of the things I was sort of thinking about, laying on a hammock one day, uh, before putting balance together, I thought, whenever we wanna pursue something, what, regardless of whether it is, whether you wanna get a master’s degree or run a marathon, or build a million dollar portfolio, retire early, whatever it is, if we start asking why, like, why do we want that ultimately.

It comes down to some derivative of life satisfaction. Like it’ll make me feel good.

So then I wanted to reverse engineer that. So, okay. Life satisfaction then is success. Success equals life satisfaction. Now let’s look at life satisfaction research. And if we live, you know, we live one, we all know we’re gonna die.

We’re all, we’re all mortal. So I started thinking about success more as a four-legged table. Like there’s the money part, you gotta have it. As much as we might say, oh, money’s not important. When we look at life satisfaction research internationally, 136 different countries assessed in a Purdue based study.

Absolutely, yeah.

Money matters. Money matters. There’s a threshold, there’s a satiation point, but money matters. Right? The, the other leg is the health leg. Then there’s the sense of purpose, and then finally there’s the relationship leg, which arguably is the most important leg of all the relationship you have with yourself and the relationship you have with others.