page forty-five: Succeed Again, Succeed Better

One of my favorite evenings of the year is Oscar night. Watching the celebrities arrive, all glammed up and glittering, never gets old. I have not always seen the nominated films, nor do I always recognize the stars, and yet there is something in the bright ceremony itself that draws me in: the announcement of each award, the joyful reactions, the speeches overflowing with gratitude for family, colleagues, and friends, and finally the moment of receiving. To me, and to millions around the world, this is what success looks like. And after basking in all that shared excitement, we humbly return to our own unspectacular realities.

But what about us? The ones watching from our living rooms. Are our lives success stories? And who gets to decide that anyway?

I have been sitting with that question, and part of the answer, I think, lies in how we spend our attention. Between scrolling through social media and watching television, we spend hours looking outward, admiring, comparing, and sometimes even envying the lives of others, while our own moments of success pass by unnoticed. Add to this our built-in negativity bias, the wiring that evolution gave us to spotlight what is missing while staying quiet about what is already going well. It once kept us alert to danger, but today it ends up convincing us that nothing we have done is enough. This is likely why even the most outwardly successful people can find themselves endlessly chasing the next thing, never quite enjoying the feeling of “enoughness.”

I have led groups from here to India, and my fellow travelers are always struck by something they did not expect to find. In people who have so much less by every conventional measure, they see an energy, a lightness, even a joy. Far from sad or defeated, these are people who go about their lives with a kind of ease and contentment that we, with all our abundance, often struggle to find. And the statistics bear this out. Rates of suicide and violence are significantly higher in the United States than in India and many other less affluent parts of the world. More is not always more.

All of this invites us to widen our own definition of success, to include not just wealth, beauty, excellence, and fame, but also wonder, meaning, and connection. What if we looked back at our lives through that lens, and let what we may have dismissed as ordinary become the true measure of how successful we are?

Instead of scrolling through social media and measuring ourselves against the curated lives and picture-perfect reels of others, what if we turned to the very phones in our hands for something else? What if instead of scrolling through other people's posts and reels, we scrolled through our own pictures and videos? The selfie with the old friend we bumped into unexpectedly, both of us grinning from ear to ear. The first snowfall in the backyard, with the world still asleep, the ground spotlessly white and impossibly beautiful. The screenshot of a message that moved us to tears. The meal we were so proud of, we photographed it before anyone could eat it. These are not small things. These are the shades of excellence, brilliance and gorgeousness already woven into the fabric of our ordinary days.

Every life has its moments of success, even in the midst of difficulty and uncertainty. And as we learn to look back with new eyes, we may discover that we too are success stories, not in spite of our unspectacular lives, but because of them. Success is not one-size-fits-all. It is as unique as each one of us. What belongs to us to own and celebrate, nobody else can claim or replicate. Our success story is ours alone, a collection of moments that felt so right we wanted to hold on to them. Those moments were never celebrated in a public ceremony, but they live on our phones, in our hearts, and in the hearts of those whose lives we touched.

Samuel Beckett once invited us to fail again and fail better. Today I would like to add my own invitation: succeed again and succeed better. Not on the red carpet, but in the ordinary, luminous moments that are already yours. Savor them, relish them, and revisit them often, for nothing in this world belongs to you more than these moments do.