Success Stories
A few weeks ago, I went cycling with Steve, Tom Watkins, and Art, stopping afterward at The Local for ice cream. We were talking about our families and I mentioned that my daughter, Aline, was about to graduate from UVA. Steve said that whenever he attended graduations there, he always pictured the graduates as future senators and CEO’s. Art nodded, telling us about the UVA Pi Kapp fraternity reunion he had attended the previous weekend.
“You never know how successful someone’s going to be,” Art said, telling us that one of his fraternity brothers literally used to eat light bulbs as a party trick but is now the Dean of the Engineering School at a prominent east coast university. The conversation moved to Art and Martha’s trip to Alaska, and Steve told us that the son of one of his former partners had left a good job in the city to move to Alaska because he had wanted to be closer to nature.
The conversation made me think about the meaning of success. Many would say that being a senator, CEO or the Dean of Engineering at a prominent university was a success story. Perhaps not as many would say that living off the grid in Alaska was. You’d probably agree that graduating from UVA was a success, but would you say the same about the 6% of Aline’s classmates who had dropped out?
Michael Jordan might. “I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed,” he said.
In his Yogi of the Month Q&A, Steve said that yoga was a good, constant reminder that life was always about the journey, not the destination, and that improvement came in baby steps, not giant leaps.
To me, Steve’s and Jordan’s realizations are keys to success. On the mat, we show up again and again, trying and failing, making baby steps toward strength, balance, and flexibility as we try to stay present enough to embrace the journey and calm the mind. We have good days and bad. Some of us stick with it. Some of us drop out. Are some of us more successful than others?
My answer is going to circle back to the headline quote from Maya Angelou. Whether you’re the Dean of Engineering, living off the grid in Alaska, sweating on your mat, or eating lightbulbs; whether you graduate from college or drop out, if you can embrace the good days and bad and ultimately like yourself, like what you do and like how you do it, I’d call you a success story.