I have heard too many times people saying all they want in life is to be “successful.” But what does success really mean? In their eyes it means money. It means owning multiple private jets and cars and houses. It means having anything they want right at their fingertips and not having to work very hard to get it. It means having others look at your life and be jealous. That’s not how I define success. It’s not about how much money you make or what you own, but what you do with your life.

You could be living paycheck to paycheck and be barely getting by, but if you’re happy, then you are successful. Do you really need those three houses, seven cars and two jets? Not a chance, but there is someone somewhere in this world who has nothing, and they are the happiest person out there. Success is defined by what you think is enough. If you don’t think that the one house you own is enough, and that you have to buy another so you can spend your summers somewhere else, then you will never think of yourself as successful.

We are conditioned to see successfulness a certain way from the media, our parents and from our peers. Reading tabloids and watching TV and seeing actors with multi-million dollar houses, we get the idea in our head that that is considered success and nothing else. Our parents want us to do well in life, even better than they have done, so they send us off to college to get an education in hopes that we will make more money than they do.

Our society as a whole bases success off of the dollar amount of things that we can afford to buy on a daily basis. If we all took a few moments a day to realize that we are successful in our own way, our lives would be much happier. If we stopped trying to outdo each other and realize that what we have is more than enough, we could all redefine success.