What is Success?

It’s a question I recently put to Owl City. I found his answer really interesting:

“If you create something and it’s sincere and you’re not writing a song to get airplay solely based on ‘I have to write a song this way because I know it will get played on the radio’. If you finish a piece of music and you’re so thrilled about it and nobody can convince you to change it, that’s where you know you’ve captured a level of success that the industry doesn’t know how to measure.

“So much of the way the industry is run is based on ‘we have to make this kind of sound because we know it’s going to do well or is hot on the radio right now’. If a song is finished and means something to you, whether it goes to number one or doesn’t get released at all there’s something special about that.”

Is success money-dependent?

Before you point out it’s easy for a musician with a contract at Universal to make such comments, let’s remember where Adam Young came from. For many years, Adam was using his sleepless nights (he’s a long time sufferer of insomnia) to make music in his parent’s basement.

Uploading his music to Myspace, he had an audience which started with a handful of fans. Today he has over 500,000 friends on Myspace (I know! Who are these active users of Myspace? I haven’t met one for about 10 years)

The point is that Adam Young knows what it feels like to make music that doesn’t make it big. To him success is not associated with numbers – both in terms of size of audience and size of pay packet.

On the other hand, it’s all very well talking about how true success is just staying true to yourself. But many would argue that if ‘staying true to yourself’ results in bankruptcy then Adam’s comment loses its impact.

Is success everlasting?

I believe that one of the most important things anyone could ever learn about success is that it’s always temporary. Superhero’s lyrics: “In the end it’s all gunna burn up so we’re just taking what we need for the journey” highlights this. The truth is when we die – and whether you believe in an afterlife or not – our possessions, our success, our wealth and our fame remain on earth.

Look at the Pharaohs of old who were buried with all their wealth. Where are these great kings now? What’s left of their bodies may be left in those pyramids or museums but they didn’t take their armies or treasures with them to the afterlife as they once believed. Their soul, their personality and who they were as individuals is long gone.

Reflecting on death isn’t something I’d normally recommend, but when it comes to the topic of success, this is a helpful avenue to go down. If all your success, wealth, possessions etc is temporary then the rat race is at worst questioned and at best loses all of its power on an individual’s life. If you understand that the legacy of how you treated others would be remembered and celebrated a million times more than how many DVDs you collected or how many promotions you received, perhaps we’d all live a little differently?

Is success poor?

There’s been quite a bit of talk in the Christian world of late about living “radically” and giving literally everything away to the poor. Such preachers will take Jesus words out of context to provoke their audiences into believing that God requires the same thing of every individual - to sell everything and give all the money to the poor. (If this were true then the rich would become poor overnight and the poor would become rich overnight – so nothing would actually be solved. The roles would merely be reversed.)

Giving away your worldly possessions. Giving millions to charity. It sounds very admirable, and of course it is…

But I come back to Superheros lyrics – which I believe to be based on Biblical principles. They do not read: “In the end it’s all going to burn up so we’re not taking anything anywhere”. No! We live in a world where some things are necessary for our time here on earth.

Money is not the root of all kinds of evils. But loving money is. This allows for a system where Christians don’t have to feel guilty about being wealthy or having nice things, but they do have to guard their hearts to make sure they are not worshipping money.

It seems to me a balance must be struck between being truly generous with our time, money and possessions – so that we can help those in need – and recognising that having nice things is not sinful or wrong.

If we can learn to just take what we need to get us through the journey (our time on earth) and not feed the consumerist monster that lives inside of us all, then this tricky word ‘success’ may start to make more sense.

Is success salvation?

I’ll leave you with a thought from Paul on his view of success. As you can imagine, it’s a lot better than anything I’ve written so far:

“I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them crap, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”

And that’s my musings on success, with the help of Owl City, the Pharaohs and St Paul. Now it’s over to you: What is success? Let me know in the comments.