There Is More Than One Way to Be Successful

Most of us inherit a definition of success before we ever get to choose one. It arrives through a parent's expectations, a school's rankings, a social feed full of announcements, or a job title that sounds impressive at a dinner party. The picture usually includes a bigger salary, a higher rung on the ladder, and a visible sign that other people noticed. A woman can reach nearly all of it and still wonder why the feeling she expected never showed up. That quiet mismatch deserves attention, because the research on how people judge their own lives points somewhere more interesting than a corner office.

Psychologists, sociologists, and pollsters have spent decades asking people what makes a life feel like it went well. The answers are consistent enough to be useful and varied enough to show that no single template fits everyone. Reading that evidence slowly gives permission that many women have been waiting for. It also gives a practical way to build a definition of success that holds up when no one is watching.

What People Say Makes Life Meaningful

In late 2017, Pew Research Center ran two national surveys on this question. One asked Americans to describe in their own words what makes life feel meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying. The other asked them to rate fifteen possible sources of meaning. Family came first in both. When people had to name the single most meaningful part of their lives, 40 percent said family and 20 percent said religion, with the remainder spread across many other answers.

Career came up as well, though it was not the main event. About a third of respondents (34 percent) mentioned their job or career, and 19 percent mentioned friends. Money was named by roughly one in five Democrats (21 percent) and one in four Republicans (25 percent). Friendship also tracked with circumstances, since a quarter of people earning at least $75,000 a year mentioned friends, compared with 14 percent of people earning under $30,000. The takeaway is that success, as ordinary people describe it, is a mix of relationships, work, faith, security, and contribution, and the mix changes from one woman to the next.

Why the Loudest Goals Do Not Always Pay Off

Psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan studied this in a 1996 paper, "Further Examining the American Dream," published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They separated goals into two groups. Extrinsic goals are the ones that depend on outside approval, such as financial success, an appealing image, and social recognition. Intrinsic goals come from inside a person, such as self acceptance, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health.

In their adult sample, people who ranked the extrinsic goals as central to their lives reported lower vitality, lower self actualization, and more physical symptoms. People who ranked the intrinsic goals as central reported higher wellbeing and less distress. A second study with college students repeated those findings. A later study by Christopher Niemiec, Richard Ryan, and Edward Deci followed people after college and found that reaching intrinsic goals was linked to better psychological health, while reaching extrinsic goals was not and was even slightly linked to worse health.

None of this means ambition or money is a problem. A study of 952 Croatian high school and college students by Majda Rijavec, Ingrid Brdar, and Dubravka Miljković found that hope of reaching both kinds of goals added to life satisfaction and vitality. The more useful reading is that a goal works best when it comes from something you value rather than something you want others to see. A raise that funds a life you chose feels different from a raise chased to prove a point.

What Eighty Years of Watching People Shows

The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 and has followed 724 men from two starting groups. One group was 268 Harvard undergraduates, and the other was 456 boys from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. Some went on to become doctors and lawyers, and one became a United States president. Robert Waldinger, the study's current director and a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, sums up the central finding by saying good relationships keep us happier and healthier.

The details are worth knowing. People who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 turned out to be the healthiest at age 80. Warm, close relationships protected both body and mind, while living in constant conflict wore people down. Waldinger has also noted that good relationships do not have to be smooth all the time. The men in the study were not measured by their titles at 40, and the women reading this do not have to be either. A caution applies here, because the original participants were all men, so the findings are best read alongside the many other studies that point the same direction.

Success Changes Shape as You Do

A survey by Citi and LinkedIn of more than 500 women who were LinkedIn members asked what "having it all" meant to them. Only 17 percent said reaching the top of their field was part of it. Most said they felt successful when they had a job they enjoyed and an employer who valued their work. Fifteen percent defined success as being their own boss.

Age changed the answers. Women under 35 were more than twice as likely as women over 35 to tie success to reaching the top of the corporate ladder. Women over 35 were more than twice as likely to tie it to working for themselves. Linda Descano, who led Citi's women's initiative at the time, said the results show there is no one size fits all scenario for how women define success. That fits what most of us have lived, since the version of success that excited you at 25 rarely matches the one you want at 45.

Six Places Success Can Live

Psychologist Carol Ryff offers a useful map. Working with Corey Keyes, she described six dimensions of psychological wellbeing in a 1995 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They are self acceptance, positive relationships with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. Her model draws on Aristotle's idea that a good life is about living well rather than only feeling good.

Environmental mastery means managing your daily life and responsibilities with competence, and autonomy means directing your behavior from within instead of by social pressure. Purpose in life means having goals and a sense of direction, and personal growth means continuing to develop over time. A woman can be strong in some of these and still building others, and that is an ordinary human pattern rather than a failure. It also explains why two women with the same job title can feel entirely different about their lives.

How to Write Your Own Definition

You do not need a retreat or a coach to do this. You need a notebook, thirty quiet minutes, and a willingness to be honest. These five steps are written for anyone starting from zero.

List the definitions you inherited. Write down every message you remember about what a successful woman looks like, from family, school, workplaces, and media. Use full sentences, such as "A successful woman owns a home by thirty" or "A successful woman never asks for help." Do not judge them as you write, because the goal is to get them out of your head and onto paper. Once they are visible, you can see how many of them were never your choice.
Sort each one as inside or outside. Read each sentence and ask whether it would still matter if no one ever found out about it. If the answer is yes, mark it as an inside goal, which matches what Kasser and Ryan called intrinsic. If the answer is no, mark it as an outside goal, which matches their extrinsic category. Neither type is wrong, but seeing the balance tells you where your energy has been going.
Rate yourself on the six dimensions. For each of Ryff's six areas, give yourself a number from 1 to 10 for how you feel right now. Write one sentence about why you chose each number, using specific examples from the past month. Do not compare your numbers to anyone else's, because the scale is for you alone. The lowest and highest numbers both tell you something useful.
Write your definition in three sentences. Choose the two or three areas that you want to carry the most weight in the next year. Write one sentence for each, in your own words, using plain language such as "Success this year means I am home for dinner four nights a week." Keep each sentence concrete enough that you could tell, on a given Friday, whether it was true. Post the three sentences somewhere you will see them.
Review it twice a year. Set two dates on your calendar, perhaps in January and July, and reread what you wrote. The Citi and LinkedIn findings show that definitions of success shift with age and circumstances, so changes are expected. Cross out what no longer fits, add what does, and note what moved. Treat each revision as information about who you are becoming rather than a sign you got it wrong.

A Closing Thought

Viktor Frankl wrote in the preface to the 1992 edition of Man's Search for Meaning that people should not aim at success. His point was that success, like happiness, cannot be pursued directly and tends to follow when a person gives herself to something larger than herself or to someone she loves. The studies above arrive at a similar place from a different direction. The women who describe their lives well tend to describe people, purpose, growth, and work they respect, and the order in which they rank those things belongs to them. Your definition can look nothing like the one next to you, and it can still be complete.