Andrew Alpaugh Blast From the Past

When I was younger, I had a very clear picture of what success looked like. It had a job title in it. A certain kind of car in the driveway. A house in the right neighborhood. It looked like confidence from the outside — moving fast, making decisions, knowing exactly where you were headed. I spent a lot of years chasing that picture. Some of it I caught. Most of what I caught didn't feel the way I thought it would. And eventually I had to sit down with the question I'd been avoiding: whose version of success was I actually running toward? The answer was uncomfortable. It was assembled from pieces I'd picked up along the way — from how my parents measured things, from what got respect in the environments I worked in, from the cultural shorthand of what "making it" was supposed to look like. Very little of it was actually mine. I don't think this is unusual. I think most people operate on a borrowed definition of success for a long time before they reali...