Recently I was talking to an old friend of mine that is in Japan. He’s a very smart guy and has really great goals.

I couldn’t help but notice his interest for success, both in terms of wealth and appearance.

I changed a lot of opinions about this topic. First I was all about the so-called romantic view. Money isn’t important, love beats us all, etc. 

Then I got into the money bandwagon and I was like “how could I have possibly be so naive?! Money isn’t a problem and we all should earn it” and so on.

The change was not sudden but it sure changed me in many ways. 

Even though I was now interested in money I stayed away from the many programs that talk about money without considering the human part of the equation.

Now I changed again my mind because while I still think that money is important and relevant, I choose time over money.

Money can always be earned. Time cannot.

And while we might even think that we are slaves to money, the real master is time. A master to which we cannot hide.

Time, quality time with the people you love, cannot be bought. And although it’s clear that you can improve the quality with money, you cannot obtain time without time in the first place.

Now let’s go back to my friend. He seems now in the phase where you sacrifice time for other things. It’s a moment of growth and for that I admire him.

But after the talk with him I couldn’t stop thinking about success.

What is success, after all? How can we define success?

Considering the elements of popularity and wealth success could be defined by the amount of respect you get from other people and the amount of money you earn through your work (money that comes from other’s pockets btw).

When I defined success like this I started thinking about the fact that we don’t own  our success. Others own our success because it’s based on qualities and elements given onto us.

We earn it like a social status, but the social status is nowhere ours.

It’s not like our sex or our eye color. It’s not like the dress we own.

We don’t control success in this terms (yes we can create it, but we would never own it anyway).

Defined like this success is like when we are some players in a game. We can rank higher, but it’s not our game.

The strange thing is that we own our time. We are the masters of it. Yet we sacrifice it for something we can’t own.