Defining Success

            This was a very refreshing lecture and I am incredibly pleased to hear Doctor Tao speaking on how success is defined both personally and as a society.  It’s long been my personal feeling that the very existence of a societal definition of success is a negative, acting only to smother the aspirations and goals of those who choose to pursue a different life avenue than the most financially secure one.  After all the notion that money should be the most important goal of a person walks hand in hand with the idea the idea that a person’s job is the soul thing that defines them and gives them merit.  This philosophy is and always will be toxic, serving to reinforce harmful ideals about employment and self esteem that force people into wasting their lives working at jobs they hate and are not valued all in the name of monetary security and an inflated sense of self-worth due to their occupation.  I’ve seen this personally with close individuals who’ve been left devastated and directionless in the wake of losing a position or suffering some form of money issues.  They use their job as a crutch for self-definition and once its gone they emotionally and mentally collapse, unmoored without the tools to pursue a version of success that doesn’t come with an big occupation title and a big salary. 

            The points about habits and what constitutes a habit were interesting as well as were the personality types discussion.  I’ve taken a personality test before but I’ve never found them to be all that reliable.  Simply put I often find that my alignment with introversion or extroversion can waver in the extreme between both sides.  The legitimate definition of the terms is that an introvert draws energy from solitude while an extrovert draws energy from people but I often find that where I draw energy from can radically shift between those two extremes with little to no consistency as to why.  I will say that the test is a very useful tool for understanding brain chemistry and especially how our brains will react to certain chemicals.  For instance being an extrovert predominately I find that caffeine makes me far more productive during the morning hours.