This weekend found me browsing Substack, revisiting books I love and respect (and want to emulate in my own), and polling friends about success.
And I realized: we’ve left it to the wolves. Which wolves you ask?
The TikTokers and bloggers promising you can make a million flipping houses, or selling your own makeup/design/fashion/gardening/cooking tips.
The self-care/productivity/wellbeing/happiness industrial complex.
The self-appointed philosophers and gurus who reel in followers by appropriating and trivializing insights from ancient Greece or world religions.
This co-opting of the notion of success worries me.
I get it: the way our elders and advertisers defined success is literally killing us. [See more on: burnout, anxiety, eating disorders, Ozempic shortages…]
It’s also killing the planet, built on extraction of energy, labor, and land. [More on Columbus Day in a sec.]
And the so-called antidotes (“self-care,” “tradwife-ing,” “let them,” return to “greatness”) often just model how to be more self-absorbed, revisionist historians, or exclusionary.
But we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We, who want our lives and work to matter. Who want to make our grandchildren [whether current, future, or imagined] proud. Who still believe in — and follow, at least most times — the Golden Rule.
Solving the polycrisis requires us to want to be successful — not in the old one-dimensional way, and not in a blithely naïve, denialist way either. But in a multidimensional, pragmatic, and deeply human way that reflects who we are now and who we still want to become.
Success doesn’t need to be cancelled. It needs to be redefined.
From Commemoration to Creation
Yesterday, in anticipation of today’s contested national holiday, Heather Cox Richardson reminded us:
“History is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present.”
That distinction matters. Because when we think or talk about success, we are trained to present living commemorations — or desired future commemorations — not authentic histories.
We celebrate overwork as “drive.”
We glorify missed birthdays as “sacrifice.”
We enshrine exhaustion as “legacy.”
We equate financial fortunes with “worth.”
We’re honoring a myth, and it does not serves us.
And like a nation that refuses to confront its past, we can’t design a better future until we tell the truth about what’s broken.
A Rebrand for Success
Here’s a starting point: the word success comes from the Latin succedere: “to come after.”
It doesn’t mean winning.
It means what follows.
Success is what follows from the systems we build — and the choices we make, moment to moment, within them. It’s both the how and the after.
Joy, delight, and engagement in the moment matter; they’re part of the how. But the why still deserves attention. What are we building toward? What patterns are we reinforcing and rewarding? What will come after us because of how we lived today?
The goal isn’t to chase future rewards; it’s to align the present and the future so that what follows feels like a worthy outcome, a merited return on effort, not a trivial, ill-gotten, or meaningless gold star or check.
True success is systemic: it integrates the personal, relational, and societal — what I call ME, WE, and WORLD: the three dimensions of a worthy life. This multidimensional approach generates upward spirals of growth, impact, and fulfillment, rather than leaving us exhausted and isolated.
The New Commemoration
In honor of today — and all the hate and reactivity being spewed about what to call this “holiday” — I want to propose a deeper and more useful rebrand.
Words matter. But frankly, we don’t have time, or skills for dialog required for the thoughtful conversations and compromise that would lead to accurate and agreeable labels. What is urgent — and important — is to redesign the systems that shape our lives.
Let’s redefine success: not as domination, balance, or burnout, but as a dynamic, multidimensional approach to alignment that sustains us, our teams and families, and the world around us.
Because in the end, success is not a victory to celebrate.
It’s a ripple to design thoughtfully, so that each of leaves the world better, truer, more alive because we were in it.
That’s what I call success. The kind that follows. And lasts.
