Well said, Tim Denning! I was coming to the same sense of priorities in thinking about life. I never thought of measuring my success in terms of these two yardsticks, however.

I have reflected on my own life on several days and discovered that I had learned something each of those days. Sometimes the lessons are profound, but other times they are small, but they are still there. Frankly, I have been amazed by how persistent this pattern is.

I daresay this encourages me to define one leg of the success equation to simply ask the question, have you identified what you learned today?

I am so confident that we can identify something every one of us learns in the day, that earnest introspection will turn up something. The subordinate question will then be to ask yourself how profound the lesson was. If you keep coming up with simple learnings, you can ask the question what you could have done differently to make a more consequential discovery that day.

Regarding helping or inspiring others, I would find it hard to do it every single day. Our lives and interactions with others may not always lead up to an accomplishment in this space every single day. I would find it difficult to characterize days when I haven’t inspired someone else (that I know of) to be failures. The better yardstick for me is to ask myself whether I have done anything that day which would develop into an inspirational accomplishment in the future.

For example, I recently taught a public speaking workshop for youth over a couple of months. This was outside my comfort zone. Wanting to do a good job of being a teacher, I spent considerable energy during those months planning the lessons and executing those lesson plans throughout. If I had asked myself whether I helped or inspired anyone on many of those days, the answer would have been negative, but in reality my activity during each of those days had a component that would eventually do exactly that.

So, my yardstick for that may simply be whether I thought about and planned anything that would help others. If I happened to actually help or inspire someone, great. Otherwise, as long as I was on the path to doing so, the day would have to be a success too.

These are variations that work better for me and I feel for everyone else too!

But, thanks for stimulating my thoughts on this topic and giving me a chance to articulate them here. If this helps even one person, today is a successful one for me because this entire message is a discovery and learning for me :)