I recently came across an idea from Howard H. Stevenson that made me understand success in a way we usually don't discuss.
He says there are four types of satisfaction, and the obvious part is that they’re independent. Getting one doesn’t guarantee the others. You can have all four, just one, or none, and having one tells you nothing about the rest.
The four are achievement, significance, happiness, and legacy.
Achievement is the external stuff. Money, power, fame, mastery of a craft. It's driven by recognition or by competition, by wanting to be better than the person next to you, or better than you were yesterday.
Significance is different. It's the impact you have on the people you truly care about. Strangers or an audience doesn't count here, but those in your actual life do. It's also a choice, both internal and external, about who you decide to show up for.
Happiness is smaller than both of those. It's contentment with yourself right now, in this life as it is. Not what it could be, not what it looks like from the outside.
Legacy is the strangest one, because you don't get to define it. It's your impact on the future, but that impact is decided by other people, long after you're not around to argue about it.
He gave a great example: Marilyn Monroe. She achieved massive fame, recognition, and a level of success most people will never touch, yet by most accounts she was not happy. Achievement was there. Happiness wasn't. One didn't buy the other.
Then there's his grandfather. No fame, no major external achievements, yet significant to the people who actually knew him. Significance without achievement.
I think most of us walk around assuming these four are one thing. That if you get the achievement, the happiness comes with it. If you are important to your family, you must also be satisfied. But they don't move together. You can chase one for twenty years and wake up wondering why the other three never showed up.
The way to look at it is to consider which one you should actually optimize for right now (forget about which sounds best when spoken aloud, think about which one is actually consuming your time).
If you don’t pick, you can’t complain when you end up with the one you didn’t want.