Success: Revisited, Revised, Reevaluated

I want to be successful. I've wanted to be successful ever since I knew that there was a possibility that I won't be. I think we all want to be successful, yes? But at what cost? I've never seen "success" as a negative thing, and I probably shouldn't; to me achieving success is reaching a point where you've accomplished something that you want to do and are happy with the outcome. Lately though, I've thought about success in a different way, what I refer to as "popular success", where you've achieved something that not only you want, but that 'benefits society', or some cliché like that. And when I think about success this way, I think about it in a much more negative way, like, "what will I have to sacrifice to achieve success?"

A lot of this thought has been prompted by looking into the future, and thinking about stuff like "where do I see myself in 20 years?" Frankly, I don't know. I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, or even 5 days. I don't know what I want to do with my life, how I want to spend my time, reach my goals, or even what goals I want to set. I have a (rather short) list of criteria for my life no matter how I choose to spend it: 1. Enjoy my life and truly like how I live each day 2. Be an all around 'good person' to people around me. That's it. I just want to be good to myself and the people around me. Based off of this it seems like I have an infinite amount of ways to achieve "success", but if I don't truly enjoy what I'm doing then it's not really being successful.

The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be  filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.

I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 17 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all