Defining True Success: Don’t Stress About Society’s Timelines

I remember hearing a story in one of my college history classes that illustrated the great Napoleon Bonaparte’s insecurity issues. The story went something like this: At the height of his career, Napoleon came to the tomb of Alexander the Great, and upon reaching the grave, he wept bitterly and inconsolably. His grief was due to the fact that Alexander the Great had conquered the known world by the age of thirty, while Napoleon, despite all of his military success, was nowhere close to achieving the same feat. For that reason alone, Napoleon considered himself a failure. 

In my work as a mental health therapist, I have seen this type of thinking a lot. I call it “the Alexander the Great myth,” meaning that people feel they have to achieve something by a certain age in order to be successful. That is simply not true at all. Success does not come with a deadline; it comes with a quality line. Let me repeat that: timeframes have nothing to do with success. However, your personal view on what you have achieved does. 

Why do I bring this up? Because I feel that we, as a society, have our priorities wrong. We put too much emphasis on finding success early. We tell young people to figure out what they will do for the rest of their lives, when they’ve barely begun to figure out who they are. We consider marriage successful if a couple is married a long time, not whether they were happy and able to nurture each other throughout those years. We look at a person’s bank account numbers as a sign of achievement, not whether the person feels personally fulfilled by the work they do. And instead of looking at the big picture of a person’s life and allowing them to decide the definition of success, we do that for them based on our own standards, applying a long list of “shoulds” that must be checked off by some arbitrary time. Otherwise, they have failed. And it’s not fair. 

So in case you’re feeling like Napoleon Bonaparte at the tomb of Alexander the Great, pause and take a deep, cleansing breath. Cry if you want to and hug yourself or a friend if you need to because it’s okay to feel that way. We all experience fear and insecurity about whether we have done enough or are good enough. That feeling does not need to define us. We have the right to define ourselves based on ourselves, not others. And that is true success.

Ashley Woodruff is an adjunct professor of Psychology