You Are Chasing a Definition of Success You Never Chose

Three very different teachings circle the same question, and none of them tells you to stop working hard.

The Gita's move is to shift where success lives. Krishna tells Arjuna to act with full effort but let go of the knot of outcome — and then defines steadiness itself as the goal: 'evenness of mind is what is called yoga' (2.48). Success, here, is less a trophy you reach and more a quality you carry — staying whole whether the result lands or doesn't.

Patanjali points to something even plainer. Among the practices he lists, one is santosha, contentment: 'from contentment comes the highest happiness' (Yoga Sutra 2.42). Not as a reward at the finish line, but as a setting you choose now, mid-race — the radical idea that enough can begin today.

And long before either, the everyday answer: the grandparent remembered not for their bank balance but for being kind, fair, unhurried, present. Almost nobody, at the end, measures their life by their salary. They measure it by who they became and who they loved. The oldest answers and the most ordinary one agree — which is itself worth noticing.

Put the old picture and the new one side by side and the contrast is sharp. Then, you were mostly measured by people who knew you — neighbours, family, the village — across years, by how you behaved when no one was filming. Now you are measured, in seconds, by strangers who see only a slice: the photo, the title, the highlight. The judge changed from people who knew your whole life to people who know none of it.

That shift has a cost we rarely name. When the scoreboard is run by strangers, you start performing for an audience that will never actually sit at your table. You can win their applause and lose the evening with the people who do.

But here is what did not change, and it is the steadying part. What a human being most needs to feel a life is well-lived is almost exactly what it always was: meaningful work, a few real bonds, the freedom of wanting less, the quiet of a clear conscience. The metrics on the surface have gone loud and fast. The thing underneath them — what actually satisfies a person — has barely moved in three thousand years. We are running on a new scoreboard to win an old, unchanged prize.

There is a moment in the Mahabharata that quietly answers this whole question. Yudhishthira, dying of thirst at a lake, is stopped by a yaksha who will let him drink only if he answers its riddles. One question is: what is the greatest wonder in all the world? Yudhishthira's reply is one of the most piercing lines in the epic — day after day, countless beings go to the house of death, and yet the one who remains lives as though he will never die, as though he will never lose a thing.

That is the hidden engine under our scoreboard. We chase the next rung as if there will always be time to enjoy it later, as if nothing — health, people, the years themselves — is quietly draining away while we climb. Seen against that, success stops being a finish line at all. There is no line; there is only direction. The honest question is not 'have I arrived?' but 'am I walking toward a life I would be glad to have lived, if it ended sooner than I planned?'

That reframing doesn't kill ambition. It cleans it. You can still build, earn, strive — but for reasons you actually chose, on a scoreboard you actually checked, instead of one handed to you by a crowd that will have moved on by morning.

Step back and the point is simple, almost embarrassingly so. We will give years of our one life to becoming 'successful' — and most of us never spent an honest hour deciding what that word should mean for us. We let a crowd fill in the blank, and then wonder why winning their game leaves us tired.

Nothing here is against earning well or aiming high. The lesson is gentler: a definition you didn't choose will run your life until you choose one. The Gita's evenness, Patanjali's contentment, the yaksha's reminder that nothing is permanent — they are not telling you to want less out of weakness. They are offering you the pen, so that the scoreboard you sprint on is finally your own.

So here is the small, doable step, and no grand resolution is needed. Sometime this week, when it's quiet, finish one sentence honestly: 'A life well-lived, for me, would look like…' Whatever comes — and it may surprise you — start steering a degree or two toward that. Not a new race. Just your own one, run on purpose. That shift, from someone else's scoreboard to a question you actually asked, is most of the freedom there is.