This is a post that has been floating around in my TODO pile of posts for a long time. And yes my TODO pile of posts is getting very big, you might have noticed that posts have been a bit thin on the ground lately. Anyway back to the this post. The idea had been floating around for a month or so after a conversation with a friend. He had been talking to the owner of the company he works for. The owner had basically said that my friend could be doing a lot better for him self. In this context, the owner was saying that my friend should be doing better in a material sense, a bigger house, better car etc. Now my friend is definatley not the material type, okay yes he buys all the latest gadgets and toys, but he only dose this to play with them. Mostly a few months later they end up on ebay or get sold to one of his friends (like me!) My friend is much more of a family man and he judges his success by his family. And by that measure (he has two boys) he is a success, but by the owners standards he is not doing so well (he lives on a council estate, in his own home, and drives an utterly normal car).
The point I'm getting to here is the same point I came across in this article (which is why I've pulled this idea from the pile!) and that is that you can only compare your self against your self. In the end it only matters if you judge your self a success against your own standards for success.
In the situation above, the owner was judging my friends success using his own standards. This is never a good idea. Now the owner has known my friend for a long time, so he knew that he wouldn't take the comment the wrong way, my friend is not that sort of person. But in you can go around judging people by your own standards.
The owner of the company is it's founder too and so he is definitely and a business man and so it's maybe not to surprising to find that he judges his success that way and by that standard he is doing very well. However from my point of view and here I'm using my own standards to judge him ,which is something that I shouldn't do, but I'm going to anyway! From my point of view he will never be fully happy, because there will always be the bigger house or better car. However from his point of view he could say that this is good thing because this will always drive him on to bigger and better things.
So after all this do I judge my self to be a success by my own standards?
Mmmm...well no not really. I'm not really driven by material things either, yes again I like to have the latest toys to play with, but for me the latest toys usually means software, but I'm more driven by the desire to create things.
It's been really surpising to me over the last, I guess 2 years or so, that I am an arty type and that I get pleasure out of creating art. This art mostly takes the form of literary stuff, my stories, this blog and my other web sites. But this the problem. I'm not working at the creative stuff hard enough!
So yes I'm failing by my own standards.
Now I've got that off my chest I can get on with creating something....