Generally, it is assumed that success will always lead to a happy life. Accordingly, it is a long-standing notion of parents and mentors that if a young person completes their high school education, graduates from college, then finds a good job, gets married, and starts raising a family while continuing an upward climb on the career ladder, a happy and fulfilling life will ensue.
While this supposition sounds reasonable, a careful examination reveals that a happy life requires much more than a litany of accomplishments. Success merely connotes the satisfactory completion of a goal, task, venture, or project, and a successful life is a life marked by multiple achievements—as people around you can objectively affirm and may applaud.
In contrast, happiness is a subjective feeling of satisfaction, and a happy life is your sense of satisfaction about your life based on your own self-assessment—not what others see in you or think about you. Therefore, a successful life is an appraisal that an observer can make about you, whereas a happy life is strictly an appraisal only you can make about yourself.
A very successful and enviable man or woman can, of course, still be unhappy.
Patty Stonesifer, for example, was a very successful and desirable achiever on a national scale. She rose through the ranks in the technology industry and was named by Time magazine as one of the 25........