Monday's Musings - What does success look like?

What does it feel like?
If I want to meet some measure of success, I have to define it.
Failure is easy to define, even many failure conditions are easily outlined and fill me head.
But what is success?


As an artist, who thankfully, doesn't depend on selling her work to eat, I am struggling with this. Have I already succeeded, in just exactly that, being in the position to make what I want to make without regard to practical matters of salability and without the pressure of needing to make the sale to feed my family, I know I am fortunate and I am gratefully aware that if I had to feed my family on my work, I would have never begun. Yet, I would like to succeed. I want to sell my work, I want people to enjoy my work and for it to have value for them. I would like to grow as an artist and teacher.

Our society often defines success in terms of money. We can decry this all we want but in part it is so because it is easy.

If I am selling my work, then I am a business, if I am a business, there are built in expectations and costs that need to be met. That is not a bad thing really. But I am struggling with defining success for myself. On one level, each thing I create is a success and if not a business then it is enough to create. That is the success. As a business the creation is not the success, I have to do all the things that lead to someone seeing, loving (hopefully,) and purchase it. And as mercantile as that may seem there is true joy and success in creating that connection too.

So I guess success for me is the joy of the lady buying up my scarves and telling me she loves them, she hunted me down after buying one and technically I sold the remaining ones on a bus ride home over the phone.  It is the lady would brought in the hat she made from my hand spun yarn, to show me what she had made. It is the lady who got some of my yarn as a gift and wrote a post about the creation of the shawl she made with it. It is the child who was really listening to me discussing spinning and offering me some grass to spin.

All of these are success!

But they don't fit in a ledger.

And no this post is not me saying I am done selling. It is certainly, not me saying I am done creating. It is me wondering about how I can set a definition of a goal of success that has a fixed point. And right at this moment I have no answer. Maybe you do?

Still Pondering ~ Julia