This is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

(Also, this community is great and I hope it takes off!)

I agree with the sentiment. It's a lot healthier not to look at parts of your life as "phases" and more as a blend of rising and falling tides of success and happiness.

BUT. People don't define success as "forever" they define it as "until you pass away" it's a hard deadline and it makes perfect sense. If you are part of a marriage that you have a lot of fun and pleasure in. You don't want it to last forever. You want it to last 60 years or however long it will be until you die. If you love running a coffee shop, you would rightfully be devastated if operation costs rose and success ran dry before you were tired of it. And you don't want the success of the coffee shop to last forever, you want it to last at least 60 years, until you die.

Edit: to be clear cause I don't think it was, I encourage people not to have a set end goal for a hobby or a project. Success can be playing an instrument for a few years, or writing one book and dropping the hobby. But I think it's perfectly healthy to say "I want to be a writer for the rest of my life." And if you can't succeed at that and you have to drop your writing hobby, you have unequivocally failed at your goal. You just don't have to let failures like that define your life after the loss of your desired success.

This is....really good.

i think i leave the concept of success down to the individual. Did you want to start a business? Did you start a business? Well then it was a success, doesn't matter if it completely failed.

It's about how you phrase what you want to do, and about how to appreciate what you've done in the past.

Measuring your success based on how other people define it is often a problematic way to define it, as other people are often unreliable, and not inline with what you want for your life. You need to set explicit goals that you know (or think) you can achieve. That way when you achieve them (or fail) you can look back on them as a success, or at the very least, a valuable learning experience.

Speaking of failure. Failure is a non condition, failure is just a step to success. In order to find the correct solution, you need to weed out the incorrect solutions. Often times there are multiple correct solutions, with varying degrees of complexity and levels of accomplishment. The way those are chosen is not well defined by any means. There is no point in fretting on the end solution, if you know that it will do what you want it to do.

Think of failure like a side step to success. The path to success is a vertical ladder. And failure is just a horizontal shifting on that ladder. It doesn't place you any further or closer, merely offsets you from the top.