So to make it a trilogy about this topic of frame and getting people’s approval: in the first video, I talked about the idea of frame.
Are you in your own story, or are you living as somebody else’s story, living as a piece of somebody else’s story? Or are you setting your own story? The idea of keeping your frame.
And the next video, I talked about the idea of approval.
How much do you need to be approved by other people? How much do you need them to say you’re OK, versus yourself saying that you’re OK? And now, yet another way to look at it is to look at the idea of success.
What does success mean to you? Does success involve a lot of people thinking you’re great? I mean, often we look at somebody that is famous, and we say that person is successful.
“Look how popular that person is.
Success.” It seems to be maybe that’s the number two most popular definition of success, after having lots of wealth.
So being somehow recognized is a way of defining success, and it’s not completely without merit.
I mean, if you’re a professional, and you’re working within a certain field, and you become recognized as being very skilled within that field, and you know, there’s a general consensus from other people, and lots of people say, you know, “This person is excellent in that field”: that is a great accolade, that is a great piece of approval that is coming your way, and so you could see that as “OK, this is a sign, this is evidence, that I am successful in my field.” But on the other hand, is this really necessary? Is this really what defines our success? Especially when we look overall and say somebody is successful.
What if nobody appreciates you? What if nobody approves of you? Is it possible to still be successful? Or if you are famous and widely adored, does that guarantee that you are successful? It seems like it’s easy to really measure success in this way, because having some kind of metric like this kind of makes it easier to put it on a scale.
You can have like a scale of success, and you can see based on measuring your popularity, you can then judge how successful you are, where you fit on this scale, from you know, nobody, to great successful person.
But this seems like another way that we can fall into the trap of seeking approval, seeking popularity, seeking validation from outside of our OK-ness.
Being told, being reminded from outside that “Oh, you’re OK?” And I can then ask myself “Am I OK? Am I good? Oh, just look at how many followers I have on social media, or look how clearly famous I am, and then therefore OK, I’m OK.” Or on the other hand, “Well, how OK am I? How good am I? Oh look at all those thumbs down.
I’m getting thumbs down everywhere.
People unsubscribing.
Nobody knows my name.
I have- you know, look at all those other people more popular than me.
I’m clearly a failure, clearly unsuccessful.” So, well, this is one metric we can use to measure a certain thing.
This measure of how well-known you are, it’s not meaningless, but it’s not something that really defines success in a meaningful way.
So it comes down to again, just like you define your own story, you define what you approve of in yourself, you can also define for yourself: what is success for you? What would you consider a successful life maybe it only involves a few people who even know who you are, but if a few people that are close to you, they know who you are, and they really appreciate you, and you work with them, and you are good to the people around you, and you live your life according to what you believe is right, maybe that is a way of defining success.
It might not be recognized by everybody as “What a successful person.” But maybe that could be just as much a measure of success as having some kind of wide popularity and fame.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think of this idea.
How can we measure success? What are the ways that we can decide and look at things, look at our lives, and decide whether we consider things to be a success or not? Or should we even use this word and think of it that way?
#success #popularity #fame