Happiness and Success

This week, I read two beautiful posts on happiness and success.

The first one on happiness comes from Astha Parmar through her post called “Redefining Happy”. Happiness is a very relative term – and definition of happiness is different for each individual. Don’t we see people with meager resources living like kings and other wealthy ones always distressed? From a career perspective too, it is very important for us to identify what makes us happy.  Astha opines “if you want a job that’ll make you happy- take a good hard look at what ‘happy’ means to you.”

For the second one, Seth Godin takes a close look at success in his post “Successful?”. Success, like happiness, is a very relative term. And definition of success may be different for each individual. Conflict arise when our definition of success collides with how others (boss, peer or parents) define our success. Seth writes,

“A lot of organizational conflict comes from mismatched expectations of success. A lot of kids live unhappy lives because of unrealistic benchmarking from parents (as popular as that kid, as attractive as this one, as smart as the other one…).

How’s this: success is largely about keeping your promises.”

So, how do you define your happiness and in turn, success?