Success!

If you are reading on a smartphone, use landscape / hold phone sideways. 

Success! The state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations. It may be viewed as the opposite of failure. Ah, but the criteria for success depends on the context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system.

Achievement, accomplishment, triumph, victory, win, glory. These are all good synonyms for success. 

Is Tom Brady successful? How about Will Smith? Did the retire / unretire move of Tom Brady tarnish his career? Will Smith just won an Oscar for Best Actor, something that he came close to winning in the past. Is he? The best actor? Based on what criteria? 

What makes a business successful? Is it their balance sheet? Their stock price? I am old enough to remember when GE was considered the most successful company in the world. Today, not so much.

The 2022 Oscars drew 16.6 million viewers last Sunday, up 58% from last year's record low audience of 10.5 million. Despite the year-to-year improvements, Sunday's Oscars will go down as the second-least-watched since Nielsen began tracking total viewers in the mid-1970s. Prior to last year, the audience had never fallen below 20 million viewers. 

The Oscars made me think about Business Success. The financial rewards that come from being successful in business are of course important to many entrepreneurs, and are key factors in motivating people to work hard and take tremendous risks. But if success can be defined as the feelings of satisfaction and completion one has when a business career is over, success has other dimensions that for many business owners are as significant, or more so, than monetary rewards. 

Personal Success, Financial Success, Social Success, Longevity, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction. Is it possible to have all of the above, at the same time, in a business? 

The Top 10 Highest Paid Actors in the world as of 2022 are: Daniel Craig, Dwayne Johnson, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Ryan Gosling, Chris Hemsworth, Brad Pitt, and Michael B. Jordan. No women in the top 10 ten. 

Dwayne Johnson, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the top-earning actor on Forbes' list of highest-paid entertainers in 2022, with an estimated annual salary of $270 million. Never say never, but I don't see "The Rock" winning an Oscar any time soon. And now that I said that, he probably will. 

Apple Original Films' CODA, Best Picture Winner, was hardly watched by anyone. 

They say that "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder" which says that different people have different ideas about what is beautiful. 

I'm pretty sure the same is true about success.