The Heart Of The Matter

Not so long ago a friend asked me if I thought I was a success. I didn't know what to say and when I did manage an answer it was "No." I was thinking in terms of not just professional success but financial success. Where I want to be not how far I've come. I didn't think about success as a person, about emotional or creative success, about success in my marriage or in my relationships with people. My initial reaction was to think of success in narrow terms. And because of the way I replied I became aware of how limited my idea of success often is.

I thought about this when I read "The Third Man," Lauren Collin's profile of Novak Djokovic in the New Yorker. Djokovic told Collins this story:

It’s important to be humble, and important to be very open-minded toward all the people in the world. It doesn’t matter who it is, really, or how much amount of success that person has made, because you don’t measure the person through the success the person has made, but through his behavior. There is one actually great quote from Pavle, our Orthodox priest—we are not Catholic, so we don’t have a papa. He’s our spiritual leader, in a way. He passed away in 2009, and he’s actually one of the greatest people that, really, Serbia ever had. Because he was a very modest man—his sister was very ill, so he would go every day with the public transport to visit her. He never used cars; he always talked to the people. So, one great quote—he says to one kid that was saying to him that he has the best grades and so much success in the school. So Patriarch Pavle said, “That’s all great, I congratulate you, but it’s not the grades that make you a man, but your behavior.” So that’s what I try to implement in my life.

Behavior, how you treat people, showing up when things are difficult or painful, all of that over achievement. That's cool, man and rings true to me.

Here's an example of personal success: