What Is Success?

by John Fleming

As a young man, my first serious goal in life was to become an architect. I studied at one of the finest and most notable engineering schools in the country, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and was then able to gain employment in the office of Mies van der Rohe, one of the most recognized and distinguished architects of our time.

I thought that I was on my way to success. There I was, just an ordinary man, creating the blueprint for a perfectly executed life. I was building a career, as well as a personal life, and hoping for financial security.

Yet I felt that something was missing. While others described me as successful, I knew deep inside that success had to be more than I was experiencing. At that time, I thought that if my life fit the definition of success, then I was truly disappointed.

The problem back then was my definition of success. I simply equated it to “happiness and peace of mind.” Those were the two things that I thought I wanted. In retrospect, success was something that I had not really taken the time to truly define.

Like many others before me, I have sought to understand the basic steps to achieving success and how, if properly taken, they could virtually ensure that I arrived on its doorstep.

Today, I consider “success” as the ability to build your life as you want it—to take the vision of where you want to go and who you want to be, and plan each phase right down to the tiniest detail. I’ve learned that success means being honest with yourself in determining what you can build, and, once the building starts, having the courage to make the necessary and sometimes critical modifications to plan.

How Do We Achieve Success?
So how do you achieve it? As I reflect on my personal journey, I remember the steps that I thought would guarantee a successful journey. Quite simply, they were:
1) Go to school
2) Study hard
3) Get as much education as possible
4) Get a job
5) Get married

This five-step process usually starts with our first school experiences. Parents actually make decisions for us, as they coach us and urge us to do our homework, study hard and achieve good grades.

In later years, counselors encourage us to continue our education through vocational schools and other institutions of higher learning. From my point of view, this is where we have the first major breakdown in our society. For some, the cost of continuing education is prohibitive. Often, parents are not in the financial position to help with the expense of education. They have a difficult time meeting the needs of teenagers who feel peer pressure to dress well, own cars, have girlfriends and boyfriends, and participate in social activities that usually require money. To help meet growing financial obligations, many teens resort to joining the workforce too soon, often sacrificing their continued pursuit of knowledge.

Young people who are able to continue their education at trade schools, colleges and universities are guided through two to five years or more of study designed to prepare them for careers in chosen professions or fields. The end of this educational process usually yields some type of degree or certificate of completion. This achievement is one to be very proud of, but is this piece of paper a guarantee for achieving “success”?

Not if you read these startling statistics: In the United States of America, the richest country in the world, 10 percent of the population owned 71 percent of the wealth at the end of 2001, and the top 1 percent controlled 38 percent of the wealth. The bottom 40 percent owned less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that America’s 2005 personal savings rate, as a percentage of disposable income, was a negative .05 percent, the lowest in the industrialized world by some measures. The statistics represent a society that does not experience success throughout its masses.

What’s even more alarming are the global statistics: 2 percent of the global population control more than 50 percent of all of the world’s wealth! The richest 10 percent actually control 85 percent of the world’s wealth! What’s missing in the educational process that prevents so many from achieving a higher level of success? Why is it that so many can invest so much time in attempting to do all the right things, and still not attain their goals? How do we achieve happiness and peace of mind, freedom from debt, and financial stability?

To answer those questions, I reflected on the principles of design and construction I learned while studying the architecture of buildings. And this is the answer that I found.

We take the one course of action that will ensure us personal success: We become the architects of our destinies. We create the blueprints for the lives we want to live. We go back to the basics in assessing who we are and what we want to build, we design plans of our choosing, and we note what we need to change to achieve successful lives.

The Room Within
Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s most famous architect, once said that “the room within is the great fact about building.” If you think about that in terms of personal development, he was absolutely right. Your room within is the great fact about building your life. You have the ability to decide exactly who you want to be and to design the life you want to live. Each brick of experience can be carefully placed to create the monument that is you.

I truly believe that the one thing sorely missing in our educational institutions today is an emphasis on the basics: the basic knowledge of how to understand ourselves and gain control of our lives. If we better understood these basics, more ordinary people would become extraordinary achievers.

I don’t believe, however, that our journey through life needs to be complicated. We don’t need to spend years on blueprints for Taj Mahals that, realistically, will never get built. We simply need to construct a solid framework—strong in foundation and aesthetically pleasing—that will stand proud in the world.

—John Fleming