What Is Success?

Not long ago, I sat with a dear friend and said something I've told myself for years:

"I may not have succeeded at everything, but I hang my hat on the fact that I tried."

She didn't let me get away with it.

She looked at me and said,

"That's bullshit. You are successful by any measure. Don't position yourself otherwise."

Her words stopped me.

For a long time, I've carried the belief that effort was enough.

I opened businesses that closed.

Drew ideas that never made it past the sketch.

Pushed projects that stalled halfway. My pride wasn't in the outcomes;

it was in the showing up,

the trying,

the refusing to quit.

But maybe that's only half the truth.

In design, most lines don't survive the process.

Budget cuts them.

Clients erase them.

Builders adapt them.

Yet some remain. The bones of the idea carry through to the finished space. Not everything makes it, but something does.

And that "something" is enough.

It stands.

People walk through it,

live in it,

and it holds its place in the world.

Maybe success is like that.

Not perfection.

Not every dream realized.

Not even "just trying."

Success is what still stands when the cutting, erasing, and adapting are done.

Zen teaches that the cherry blossom is no less perfect because it falls.

Its brief moment is its completeness.

In the same way, a life of building, teaching, trying, and beginning again is not measured by what vanished but by what remains.

I needed her reminder. Maybe you do too.

What is success? Perhaps it's simply this:

To build, to lose, to build again, and to see what still stands when the dust clears.

Field Note:

Success is not every line drawn, nor every dream fulfilled. It is what remains standing after all else is erased.