Meeting discussions on "a successful life"

A number of interesting ideas came out of the discussion last night on what is a successful life.

Success is measured by a "portfolio of goals" rather than a single goal as the earlier post may suggest.

Success is also based on the evaluator.  Mozart may be a very successful composer and musician to the rest of us but he apparently had a terrible life.   Even if he had a good life, his goals may be different than what the general public judge him on.

We have a tendency to start off with simplistic, idealistic goals such as "kill cancer". However, as we appreciate the issue more and realize that cancer is actually many diseases with different characteristics and massive effort had been spent to get to where we are to date,  we may modify our goal.  Instead of aiming to "kill cancer", we may aim at "progressing the understanding of the causes of cancer".

It is the logical progression of breaking down a long term goal into smaller concretely identifiable goal that we can aim better at.

Another example of this type of goal setting is how immigrants typically say they are immigrating to a new country so that their children can have a better future.  It is likely that the immigrant is not familiar enough about the new country to properly identify the exact goals he is to achieve.  However, the overall picture is positive enough that it is worth doing.

Most people at the discussion did not feel comfortable about adjusting the goals in order to achieve a sense of success.  It seem artificial and cheap somehow.  All that we will achieve is by watering the standards if we move the passing grade from 60% to 50% so that more students can claim they have successfully "passed" or be "successful at" the course.

However, if the professor applied the bell distribution curve to the test results from all the students and found that the median is too low and everyone's results needed to be adjusted up by 10%,  would we still feel that the professor cheapened the course standards?

Is being "realistic" about the goal of "kill cancer" and change it to making progress towards understanding the disease also a form of adjusting (perhaps not "lowering") the goal?

I have to think that adjusting the goal to achieve success is viable but only with good justification that is satisfactory to the person involved. 

On top of that, this adjustment in the goal must also meet with approval from the person's peers and others that the person sought approval and respect from.

Changing goals is not that easy. On top of convincing ourselves that the goals should be changed to better define success, we also need to convince those whose opinion we value.

We can change our social circles but that is easier said than done.

How did we decide on whose opinion we respect?  Here comes the complex social web that we are born into, by chance come into, as well as to some extent by our own choice.

There was discussion of how our parent's expectation of us sets our main goals early on and how it is difficult for us to not adopt our parent's goals as our goals. 

It is difficult.  But understanding what is involved is the first step towards seeing what the problem is and what may or can be done.

Then there is Shula's point that being successful is always having something meaningful or interesting to do.  The day that she runs out of things to do is when she no longer thinks her life is successful.

So many ideas, so little time. We make a step forward, have a better view of the horizon, only to find the horizon moving off more than we have moved forward.

I don't think Shula will ever have a problem finding something to do!