I’m going to write this article for my future self. I don’t think this is the right way to look at life for all. I don’t think my future self would either. This article isn’t to be taken seriously.

I think success is a key predictor for life satisfaction. And I’m not using a very broad definition of success, by success, I mean “the state of being very skillful in a domain that a reasonable person from the outside would find impressive.” (I’m not happy with the definition myself, I’ll come back and redefine it someway) But I think I have a good intuition of what success means. In a vague sense, it’s (reasonable) people from the outside looking and you and being impressed.

If you’re successful, people want to hangout with you, want to make friends with you, want to help you, marry you; that’s the hard fact. If you’re not, people have limited time and they don’t want to spend it on you (and understandably so). They might be inclined to spend it with more successful people. This is quite unfair because, the success that I defined could be predicted (to some extent atleast) by genetic factors (like IQ). So luck plays role. But you could reduce that advantage others may have on you by working harder and smarter than them.

Given how the world is, it is necessary to be successful to matter. Else, you wouldn’t matter to anyone else. So you gotta work hard on building up your skills to an impressive degree so that you won’t be left behind.