Both success and happiness are extremely important. Do not neglect or ignore either of them because you think the other one is the only thing that matters.

Success is how you’re doing in terms of the analytics. Your performance. Productivity. Achievement.

Happiness is how you feel. It is something that should be reserved for describing how good you feel. Your state. We really don’t need to cancel one term in favor of expressing how much the other term matters. It’s not happiness over success. It’s not giving up on happiness in order to make more money. Making more money shouldn’t be called success, unless you really try to make money and are attempting to assess your performance relative to how close you are from such a goal.

Success shouldn’t describe certain standards or choices in life. It shouldn’t mean accomplishing something in particular. Because success means one thing: accomplishing something you aim for. Whether or not this thing was money, doesn’t matter.

The problem is in giving success a meaning that falls out of its scope and then demonizing that meaning because you are for some reason depriving yourself from enough rest or having fun. And then say that success doesn’t matter, and is cold, calculated, and devoid of soul or compassion. Because you want to emphasize the fact that feeling good is not a sin. Being happy does not mean you’re irresponsible or incompetent. But sorry, you still can be happy and not successful, because no matter how hard you try to twist meanings and manipulate the facts, success is a distinct entity from happiness, and neither one of them should be canceled because the other one is more important, and they are not interchangeable. They indicate two separate and different things.

This is not a rant. This is not just trying to be philosophically or logically accurate for the love of it. This conversation matters and is totally relevant.

If you are not successful, you will fail at everything, including even being happy. See how important it is?

If you have some passion that you want to chase because you love it and it makes you happy, if you weren’t successful at this new pursuit, you’ll end up not just having failed at something, but you’ll also end up being significantly less happy than you ever wanted to be through following your passion.