Should We Measure Success by What We Refused?

How do you define success in life?

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Today’s prompt asks how I define success in life. My first answer: personal growth, meaningful relationships, inner peace and contribution to others. I still believe every word. But nobody could disagree with it, and a definition nobody can disagree with has not yet decided anything.

So here is a harder one. A successful life is measured less by what reached than by what we refused to do to reach it.

1. Both lists avoid the same question

We often measure success by what we possess, the positions we hold, the money we earn and the recognition we receive. Thoughtful people offer a kinder list: character, family, peace, service. Yet both lists describe what we hope to be holding at the end. Neither mentions the price.

Honesty costs nothing until the day it stands between us and something we badly want. Are we honest when dishonesty would benefit us? That day tells us what we really meant by success.

2. A life summed up in refusals

More than three thousand years ago, the Egyptian Book of the Dead pictured a person at the end of life, standing before divine judges.¹ The words prepared for that moment do not recite offices, estates or honours. They are a long list of refusals. I have not caused pain. I have not caused hunger. I have not taken milk from the mouths of babes.

3. The beggar and the salary

In fourth-century BCE China, Mencius said that if he could not have both life and righteousness he would choose righteousness.² Even a beggar, he says, will turn away food that has been trampled on, though his life depends on it. Yet a man offered a huge salary will accept it without asking whether it is right.

So refusal is no luxury of the comfortable. Success itself often teaches us to stop refusing.

4. The poet who would not pass the verse

Tamil tradition tells of Nakkeerar, chief poet at the Pandya court in Madurai. A poor man came to claim the king’s gold with a verse composed by the god Shiva himself. Nakkeerar found fault with it. Shiva appeared and opened his burning third eye. The poet would not withdraw: “Netrikkan thirappinum, kutram kutrame.” Even if the third eye opens, a fault is still a fault.³

The story does not even claim he was right. It remembers that he did not bend.

5. The petty bureaucrat

In 1960 the same scene played out in a government office. Frances Kelsey was less than a month into her job at the US Food and Drug Administration when her first file arrived: a sleeping pill popular in Europe, expected to pass routinely. She asked for better evidence. The company visited, phoned her superiors and called her a petty bureaucrat. She held out for nineteen months. Abroad, meanwhile, thousands of children were being born with severe deformities. The drug was thalidomide.⁴

The greatest achievement of her career was an approval she would not give.

6. The fair objection

Refusal carries two dangers. It can become a boast, like the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not like other people (Luke 18:9–14). And clean hands can simply be empty hands: the servant who buried his talent harmed nobody, and that was exactly his failure (Matthew 25:24–30).

So refusal is only half the definition. Frances Kelsey’s refusal served children she would never meet. The Egyptian text itself moves on: I have given bread to the hungry, beer to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, a boat to the boatless.

Perhaps that is the second half: not how many people know us, but whether our presence has made a difference to someone. I may never know who benefits from what I share through Rise&Inspire. The possibility alone gives purpose to the effort.

My own short list of refusals I shall keep to myself. The Pharisee has taught me that much.

7. My definition, and a test for yours

Success, to me, is a life not bought at the wrong price and not spent on myself alone.

I consider it a success when I can look back without being ashamed of the choices I have made, acknowledge my mistakes without losing confidence, and look ahead with curiosity rather than fear. Inner peace does not mean giving up ambition. It means pursuing our ambitions without allowing them to control our happiness.

Try this tonight. Write down three things you would not do, even for the promotion, the sale or the applause. Then ask when each was last tested. A refusal that has never cost you anything is still only an opinion.

A successful life is not necessarily the one that leaves behind the greatest fortune or the loudest reputation. It may be the one that can answer a simpler question: Can I live peacefully with myself?

What about you? When you look back on your life, what would make you say, “Yes, I have lived a successful life”? And what did you refuse, so that you could say it?

Notes for readers

¹ Book of the Dead, Spell 125, often called the Negative Confession. The earliest known examples date from the reign of Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BCE. Quotations follow the translation on University College London’s Digital Egypt site. This is a ritual text, prepared for those who could afford a copy, so it records an ideal of a good life and not proof of any owner’s conduct.

² Mencius (c. 372 to 289 BCE) was the leading Confucian thinker after Confucius. The passage, Mencius 6A10, opens with the famous choice between fish and bear’s paw.

³ The story appears in the Thiruvilaiyadal Puranam of Paranjothi Munivar, a Tamil sacred narrative of about the sixteenth century, and reached a wide audience through the 1965 film Thiruvilaiyadal. The king had offered a thousand gold coins for the verse. The reply is given in the form Tamil speakers quote today. In the fuller story, Nakkeerar is burned and later restored by Shiva. It is legend, not history, though poets named Nakkeerar are known from classical Tamil literature.

⁴ Frances Oldham Kelsey (1914 to 2015). The company withdrew its application in March 1962. It had already given trial tablets to American doctors, and seventeen children in the United States were documented with thalidomide-related deformities. President Kennedy presented her with the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service on 7 August 1962.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 06 November 2026: How do you define success in life?

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