The original prompt for today was this:
Write a letter to a loved one. Maybe it’s a wife, a parent, an estranged friend, or a grandparent you never really got to say goodbye to.
However, I think that is a bit too personal for a public domain. I’ll do that on my own time, but for now I’ll answer this question: what is your greatest dream in life?
My greatest dream in life can be summed up pretty easily: to be successful. Success, however, has different meanings depending on who you ask. Success to me is many things: I want to be recognized for something, I want to be able to give those around me what they want, and I never want to lose the good friends I have made along the way.
Elon Musk is known for being the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. He is regarded as a successful individual simply because his business ventures have put him very close to the top of the food chain, and because his companies are innovators that are on the bleeding edge of technology in their respective fields. But, he can be rather arrogant at times. Looking at any of his responses to fans and followers on social media such as Twitter, you can see that his success has inflated his ego to the point that he thinks everyone that has a different opinion than him is simply wrong and will sarcastically write said people off. In my eyes, Elon Musk is not successful. Sure he’s probably got more money than he knows what to do with, but how many relationships did he have to destroy to get to that point? His behavior in the public face implies it was quite a few.
Wes Bos is someone that I’ve taken quite a lot of inspiration from in the past several months. For those of you that don’t know, he is a web developer turned teacher. He produces some of the highest quality courses I’ve taken. He also has the luxury of working for himself, creating his own schedule, and being able to prioritize every aspect of his life without push back from another source. He makes it clear how important family is to him, believes in not overworking yourself, and is recognized by hundreds of thousands of developers across the globe for his content. Wes Bos is my role model in terms of what it means to be successful as of today. He has the means to be able to provide for his family and give them what they want and need, has widespread recognition, and quite often talks about the relationships he has established in his journey.
Wes Bos is my role model in terms of what it means to be successful as of today.
I got a taste of what it was like to gain widespread recognition when I built a site for people to look up movie theaters near their zip code that supported MoviePass when the company dropped their subscription price to $10/mo. The day after that drop, the company exploded in popularity. However, their site didn’t have any way of looking up theaters that supported their product. They did have an API exposed to the public that, if you gave it a zip code, it would return a JSON response with a list of theaters and several pieces of information about the theater. This obviously isn’t very user friendly, so I put together a quick site that had a UI to do this, posted it on Reddit, and within a few hours it was #4 on r/all. My tiny $10/mo VPS provided by DigitalOcean couldn’t handle the traffic, but I got to watch all of the requests coming in and interact with the people commenting on the Reddit thread. This experience is one of the reasons why I am pursuing recognition as part of my vision of success.
Being able to give those close to me what they want doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to be rich. Sure, it would help if I could buy anything I want without question, but there’s more to it than that. I want to give my time to the people that desire it most. I want to give my experience, knowledge, and passion for helping others understand development to those that want it. I want to use my skill set to provide any kind of products that a client – whether through work or through a freelance venture – ask for. Doing these things, no matter the scale, will absolutely help me achieve the other two aspects of my idea of success.
While I may have more skill or more experience than the developer sitting right beside me, that does not mean that I am a better developer
If I continue devoting efforts to fostering relationships with the people I am already close with as well as finding new people that share similar passions, the last part should be easy. Many people in my trade have an overinflated ego and think that they’re a better developer than the person sitting right beside them, regardless of experience or skill. I want to make sure I never turn out like that. I am of the mindset that I always have something to learn, and that while I may have more skill or more experience than the developer sitting right beside me, that does not mean that I am a better developer. Someone who immediately thinks they are better than everyone else in the room is someone who will never be successful in life.
As I said before, success has many different meanings. Writing something like this out helps me understand what the highest level long-term goals I should have are. I know what I want to accomplish in life – the next step is figuring out how to get there. I hope this helps you understand what success means to you.