What is your measure of success? For me, meaning keeps changing

By David McElroy · July 5, 2021

A friend called me Monday evening to give me some news about someone I used to know. A woman I knew in high school has been diagnosed with cancer. It’s Stage 4 brain cancer.

I haven’t seen the woman since high school, but her husband — who I knew casually back then — is a banker who I deal with from time to time. I knew his wife very well back then, mostly from long trips on a church bus.

A couple of weeks ago, she suddenly felt strange and passed out. She was quickly diagnosed and had surgery, but what I read about Stage 4 brain cancer doesn’t sound promising.

I can’t help thinking how much it must change your view of the world when you find out that your life is suddenly threatened in a serious way. And how does it change you when this happens to your wife? Or your husband? Or whoever you love most?

Wouldn’t it completely change the meaning of your life? The things that seemed so important before would become meaningless — and the most mundane routines of love would become priceless.

I have no idea what’s going on in the hearts and minds of this old friend and her husband, so my speculation isn’t really about them in particular. The news about their lives simply has me thinking yet again about how the meaning of life keeps changing for me.

I grew up accepting the values of this dysfunctional culture a lot more deeply than I realized at the time. Even though I was a Christian, I didn’t realize the degree to which this fallen world’s values had permeated my life.

I wanted money, ego satisfaction, fame, power and glory.

There were good things I wanted to do with my power and wealth, but I see now that my goals at the time were incompatible with what I really need. I told myself that I could have everything. I could be wealthy and powerful. I could be loved and admired. I could have it all.

It took me years to realize this was a cultural lie. I had to learn that life is one long series of tradeoffs. You can’t have everything the world offers. Whatever you choose cuts off other paths. Trying to have it all guarantees you’ll end up with less than you can possibly imagine.

There was a song in 1987 that made an impression on me at the time but it’s meant more to me as the years have passed. In a song called, “What is the Measure of Your Success,” Christian artist Steve Taylor imagined a wealthy old man on his deathbed:

I am an old man
And the word came
But you can’t buy time or a good name
Now when the heirs come around
Like buzzards on a kill
I see my reflection in their envious eyes
I’d watch it all burn to buy another sunrise

The measure of my success has changed. I’ve experienced some of the success I wanted. I had the money for awhile. I never had the power, thank goodness, because I understand it would have corrupted me. But I had enough of success to realize it wasn’t what I needed. Not really.

If I came to the end of my life and had massive success — everything I once dreamed of — I would be like that old man in the song. I would want to trade it all away just to live for one more day.

But it’s not just one more day of any life. It’s one more day — or week or month or decade — of life if I’m connected to someone I love.

I was always scornful of the attitude among hippies — and popularized by the Beatles — that all you need is love. But in ways which I wasn’t prepared to discover, I’ve found they were right. I don’t know whether they understood things as I do now. Maybe, maybe not. But the right kind of love and connection are more important than any money or success.

It would still be nice to have wealth. I still believe I could find good things to do with power. But all of worldly success would be trivial without the love and connection which my heart still longs for. Some people would consider that madness or worse.

I consider it wisdom — learned from living with the pain of having made poor choices in the past.

If someone had begged me to understand this when I was 21 or 25 or 35, I would have shrugged it off. About the time I hit 40, change was slowly starting to faintly dawn for me. Today, it’s simple and obvious to me.

I can’t force anybody else to see this. I can’t force anybody else to join me in changing how success is measured. And that’s painful for me.

All I can say is that when you understand, this knowledge — this wisdom — changes you. And when it does — if it does — I hope you’ll join me. Life can have more meaning than you ever imagined it could.

But most people learn that too late to make any difference. I hope it’s not too late for me. And I hope it’s not too late for you.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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