I have spent a concerning amount of my life trying to make myself sound impressive in 150 words or less.
Resume bullets. Cover letters. Personal statements. LinkedIn descriptions. The tiny boxes on applications that ask you to explain your entire personality, leadership style, career goals and greatest obstacle overcome before the page times out. Somewhere between formatting resume margins and trying to make “sending emails” sound like a transferable skill, it becomes hard not to wonder what all of this is supposed to add up to.
A job, obviously. An internship. A better school. A better opportunity. A successful future.
But then what?
We are taught to treat success like a ladder: good grades lead to a good resume, which leads to a good internship, which leads to a good job, which leads to a good life. The problem is this version of success asks us to keep climbing without ever stopping to ask whether the ladder is leaning against the correct wall.
Success is often presented as something external and provable: a salary, a relationship, a perfectly planned future. However, a meaningful life cannot be measured that simply. The most important parts of success are often the least visible from the outside.
Psychologists call this contingent self-worth: the habit of tying your sense of value to whether you meet certain standards. For some people, that standard is academic achievement. For others, it is approval, appearance, competition, career success or being seen as someone put together. You do not just want to succeed — you need success to confirm that you are enough.
This is especially true in that strange age range between 18 and 22, when you are technically an adult, but every decision still feels like it could determine your entire future. You are old enough to be expected to know what you want, but young enough that half the time you are still figuring out how to do laundry correctly or make a phone call without mentally rehearsing it first.
Yet somehow, this is also when we are supposed to be making huge life decisions. We are expected to pursue a career, build experience, network, apply to the right opportunities and somehow know where all of it is heading.
The pressure is not always loud, but it is always there. It sits in the back of your mind when you are studying late, refreshing your inbox, applying to another internship or wondering if you are already behind in a race you never meant to enter.
The strangest part is that most of us are doing all of this for a word we cannot even define: success.
Everyone strives for it. But when you ask people what success actually means, the answers are all over the place.
I once asked someone how they would know if they were successful. They did not hesitate: spouse, two kids and $300,000 a year.
Honestly, I respected the confidence. There was something almost peaceful about having an answer so clean. No spiral, no twelve-step definition, no “it depends.” Just a number, a family and the feeling that life had gone according to plan.
But the more you sit with that answer, the more complicated it becomes.
What if you make the $300,000, but hate the way you spend your days? What if you find a spouse but the marriage is lonely? What if you have the kids but one of them gets sick? What if you get everything you said would make you successful and then life does what life does and takes something from you anyway?
That is not meant to be depressing. It just means success is hard to define because no definition can survive every possible version of being human.
Once you start adding conditions, the definition gets messier. Maybe success is making good money and having a family. But also having healthy children. And doing work that matters. And also not being so stressed that the life you built becomes something you need to recover from.
At a certain point, success stops sounding like a goal and starts sounding like a life where nothing bad ever happens – but that life does not exist.
You can make all the right choices and still not be safe from grief. You can work hard and still be disappointed. You can love people well and still lose them. You can plan your whole life around becoming stable, and then something completely out of your control can come in and rearrange everything.
So then what are we measuring?
Success cannot be one final result. It cannot just be a salary, a relationship status, a job title or a perfectly healthy family. Not because those things do not matter, they do. Money matters. Stability matters. Health matters. Pretending those things are shallow just because they are not guaranteed feels dishonest.
But they are not the whole story.
Success is not something you can hold up at the end of your life and say, “See? I did it correctly.” It is more like a relationship you keep building your entire life. It changes as you change. It changes when you gain things. It changes when you lose things. It changes when the thing you thought would make you happy suddenly feels smaller than you expected, or when something simple starts meaning more than you thought it would.
When we are younger, success seems obvious. It feels like one day you will become the kind of person who has everything figured out, and life will finally feel settled. You will have the career, the confidence, the family, the stability, the purpose. You will know you made it because your life will look like the kind of life people are proud of.
But growing up complicates that picture.
The obvious things still matter. Most of us want to do well, make our families proud, build stable lives and look back one day feeling like we used our potential for something real.
But there are other things that are harder to put on a resume. Being okay in your own head. Having relationships that do not just look good, but feel good. Laughing often. Becoming someone people feel safe around. Staying ambitious without becoming impossible to satisfy. Building a life that still feels like yours when nobody is clapping for it.
That may be why success feels so impossible to define. The things that make a life meaningful are not always the same things that make it look impressive.
Nobody asks on an application if you are kind to the people who know you best. Nobody gives you an award for learning how to rest. Nobody posts a LinkedIn update for becoming less afraid, forgiving yourself, surviving something quietly or choosing a life that makes sense to you even if it does not make sense to everyone else.
But those things matter too.
The mistake is believing success has to be something we can prove. Something we can point to. Something other people can recognize immediately. But some of the most important parts of success are not always visible from the outside.
Success is not avoiding every bad thing. That is impossible. It is building a life that can still hold love, meaning and some version of peace when bad things happen anyway.
There may not be one perfect answer. Maybe that is the point. The more we try to define success, the more it becomes clear that we are not looking for one sentence. We are looking for a way to live.
Success is not the moment when everything finally goes according to plan. It is not proof that life protected you from grief, uncertainty or disappointment. It is not one perfect outcome that tells the world you did everything correctly.
Maybe success is the ability to look at your life, with all its mess and unfairness, and still feel like you are building something honest.
Not perfect. Not guaranteed. Not always impressive.
But honest.
And maybe that should count for more than we let it.
Shreya Bhargava is a sophomore studying legal studies. Do you agree that success is seen through building an honest life? Send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com
