How a Self-Help Memoir Can Change the Way We Define Success
Success is a funny thing.
When we’re young, it usually comes with some sort of scoreboard.
Get the job. Make more money. Buy the house. Earn the promotion. Get noticed. Prove yourself. Become independent. Accomplish something impressive enough that somebody at the next high school reunion has to pretend they always knew you were destined for greatness.
Then life happens.
People get married. Kids come along. Parents get older. Careers change. Plans go sideways. Things we were absolutely certain would make us happy somehow don’t. Other things we barely noticed at the time become the memories we treasure most.
Somewhere along the way, success starts changing shape.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about looking back on a life through stories. A self-help memoir doesn’t have to turn success into another formula. Sometimes it simply gives us enough distance to ask whether the definition we’ve been using still makes sense.
In Subject to Change, I describe the book as a collection of stories, songs, and musings from my life about life. My hope is not only that people laugh, but that they step back and reconnect with the people, passions, and priorities that time and circumstance tend to push aside.
Maybe success begins with knowing which of those things deserve to be brought back into view.
Success Can Mean Something Different at Every Stage of Life
At eighteen, success might mean getting out of your parents’ house.
At twenty-five, it might mean building a career.
At thirty-five, it may involve paying a mortgage, raising children, keeping everybody reasonably healthy, and making it to Friday without losing your mind.
Later, the questions can change again.
Did I spend enough time with the people I cared about?
Did I do work that mattered to me?
Did I use whatever gifts I had?
Was I actually present for my own life?
The problem is that we sometimes keep chasing a definition of success long after we’ve outgrown it.
A goal that made perfect sense at twenty-five may not deserve the same place in our lives at fifty-five. That doesn’t mean the earlier ambition was wrong. It means we changed.
Hopefully.
I’d be a little worried if my priorities were exactly the same as they were when I was twenty-two.
For one thing, my twenty-two-year-old self had some questionable priorities.
Growing older doesn’t necessarily mean wanting less. Sometimes it means becoming more selective about what deserves our energy.
Achievement and Fulfillment Are Not Always the Same Thing
Achievement is easy to measure.
Fulfillment is trickier.
There’s usually some evidence when you accomplish something. A title. A paycheck. A trophy. A plaque. Maybe a few extra letters after your name.
Nobody hands you a certificate for being fulfilled.
And that may be why it’s so easy to confuse one with the other.
There’s nothing wrong with ambition. I’ve spent much of my life writing, performing, working, raising a family, and pursuing things that mattered to me. But I’ve also learned that assigning value entirely according to an external result can miss the point.
When my daughter was young, family responsibilities made the idea of pursuing music and writing full-time unrealistic. I kept doing both anyway, often around work and family life. Eventually I came to believe that if something matters to you, its value does not disappear simply because it never becomes a giant commercial success.
Sometimes the work matters because you did it.
Sometimes it matters because it reached one person.
Sometimes the result arrives in a form you never expected.
That idea became central to my own “DO SOMETHING!” philosophy: meaningful effort does not have to be enormous to count.
That’s a useful distinction in a culture that often measures success by size.
More money.
More followers.
More recognition.
More everything.
Sometimes more is just more.
The People Around Us Often Become Part of How We Measure a Good Life
When I was younger, success seemed mostly individual.
What am I going to do?
What kind of career will I have?
What will I accomplish?
Age has a funny way of changing the pronouns.
Eventually, the question becomes less about what I accomplished and more about who was there along the way.
My parents shaped me, even when I didn’t fully understand them.
My wife has shared most of my adult life.
My daughter changed the direction of that life in ways I could never have planned.
Friends, relatives, teachers, strangers, coworkers, and people I happened to meet at exactly the right moment all left something behind.
As a kid, I saw my parents mainly as Mom and Dad. Years later, I could see the people behind those titles: two people who grew up with very little, worked hard, sacrificed, and did what they believed was necessary to give their children a better start.
That shift in perspective matters.
A younger definition of success often asks:
What did I accomplish?
An older one may ask:
Who did I show up for?
The second question doesn’t look nearly as impressive on LinkedIn.
It may be considerably more important.
Time Changes the Value We Place on Ordinary Things
One of life’s great tricks is that many of the moments we eventually treasure don’t announce themselves as important when they happen.
They’re just Tuesday.
Dinner at your parents’ house.
Sitting around with friends.
Driving somewhere with your kids.
Hearing the same family story for the hundredth time.
An old neighborhood.
A conversation you barely remember until suddenly you do.
When we’re living those moments, they can feel ordinary.
Time changes them.
When my parents began facing serious health problems, I was in my early thirties with a young daughter and a home of my own. My wife and I seemed to have a wide-open future in front of us. My parents were standing much farther down that road.
For the first time, time itself felt different.
I began to understand something I had never thought much about when I was younger: when we take time for granted, we can also take people for granted.
That realization changes your scorecard pretty quickly.
Suddenly, another phone call matters more.
Another visit matters more.
Another ordinary afternoon matters more.
Not because ordinary life becomes extraordinary.
Because you finally understand that ordinary life was the extraordinary part all along.
Growing Older Can Expose the Limits of Conventional Success
A lot of self-help books understandably focus on improvement.
Become more productive.
Set better goals.
Build better habits.
Earn more.
Achieve more.
There’s value in all of that.
But age eventually introduces a few subjects productivity planners can’t negotiate with.
Time.
Health.
Loss.
Regret.
Mortality.
Those things don’t necessarily make life darker. In some ways, they make it clearer.
At a certain point, job titles lose some of their magic.
So does being busy for the sake of being busy.
Status becomes less impressive.
Possessions become things somebody is eventually going to have to clean out of your house.
That sounds grim when I put it that way.
I swear I’m trying to be inspirational here.
The upside is that understanding limits can sharpen priorities.
If time is not endless, then what deserves it?
If attention is limited, who deserves it?
If we only get so many chances to do something meaningful, what exactly are we waiting for?
Those aren’t depressing questions.
They’re useful ones.
Regret Can Clarify What Matters Without Defining the Rest of Our Lives
I don’t believe anybody gets through life without regret.
If someone tells you otherwise, I’d like five minutes alone with their memory.
There are things we wish we had done differently.
Things we should have said.
Things we shouldn’t have said.
Chances we took.
Chances we didn’t.
People we misunderstood.
Times when we simply didn’t know then what we know now.
Reflection can help, but only if it doesn’t become permanent residence.
There’s a difference between learning from yesterday and trying to live there.
We can’t change what happened.
We can change what we do with what happened.
That may mean apologizing.
Reconnecting.
Forgiving.
Trying again.
Or simply deciding that the next time something important presents itself, we’ll pay closer attention.
Regret has value when it clarifies.
It becomes a problem when it convinces us the remaining chapters have already been written.
They haven’t.
A Meaningful Life Is Not Always a Bigger Life
We tend to admire big things.
Big careers.
Big houses.
Big audiences.
Big accomplishments.
But some of the most meaningful things we do will never become big.
Helping someone through a difficult week.
Giving time to a local organization.
Calling an old friend.
Sharing something you created.
Teaching somebody what you know.
Making one person feel seen.
I’ve long believed in the idea of doing something rather than waiting until you can do everything.
That became especially important to me through the influence of Harry Chapin and his commitment to using what he had to help others. In my own smaller way, I’ve tried to follow that example through benefit performances and support for causes that matter to me.
You do not have to change the world.
Changing someone’s world is plenty.
Success doesn’t always need a spotlight.
Sometimes it just needs a direction.
What a Self-Help Memoir Can Make Us Reconsider About Our Own Scorecard
Maybe that is one useful role of a self-help memoir.
Not telling readers what success should mean.
Making them reconsider what it already means to them.
What do I currently call success?
Where did that definition come from?
Does it still fit?
What am I giving most of my time to?
Who am I not giving enough of it to?
What have I been postponing because I assume there will always be another chance?
And if the job title, money, possessions, recognition, and applause disappeared tomorrow, what would still matter?
By the end of Subject to Change, I come back to the question that started much of this for me years ago:
“What does it all mean?”
I still don’t claim to have the final answer.
That would ruin the suspense.
What I have learned is that genuine human connection has a durability that status, money, possessions, and approval simply don’t. And the older I get, the harder that is to ignore.
Maybe Success Is Knowing What Deserves Our Time
So maybe success isn’t something we define once.
Maybe it’s supposed to change.
At one point, success may be building a career.
Later, it may be building a family.
At another stage, it may mean using your time more carefully, returning to something you love, helping somebody who needs you, or finally realizing that the people around you were never interruptions to the important stuff.
They were the important stuff.
I don’t think that means we should stop achieving.
I think it means we should pay attention to what our achievements are serving.
Because eventually the question becomes less about how much we accumulated and more about what we did with the time we were given.
Who got our attention?
What got our energy?
Which passions did we keep alive?
Whose life was a little better because we were in it?
That may not be the definition of success I would have given when I was twenty-five.
Good.
I’d like to think I’ve learned something since then.
Maybe the better question was never simply, “What does it all mean?”
Maybe it was:
What deserves my time while I still have it?
That one probably is on the test.