Clarity about the nature of success and how to get to it can be a major life-changer. Success is actually more a spiritual condition than a material one. True contentment, a steadily heightening consciousness of reality as spiritual and concordant, and ethical living are evidences of success—they are success, in fact. Ultimately, attainment is not a social, financial, political, or corporate condition. It's not primarily about personal status.
To be more successful, we can learn to replace the widely held dark, negative, personal picture of ourselves and others with a noble and affirmative view. "Even Shakespeare's poetry pictures age as infancy, as helplessness and decadence," Mrs. Eddy points out, "instead of assigning to man the everlasting grandeur and immortality of development, power, and prestige." Science and Health, p. 244. There's the ring of true success, and it's inseparable from the true "me" of all of us.
Success and fame fascinate some people. Maybe they find it's entertaining to speculate about how some celebrated individual rocketed to the top, and perhaps there is some drama if the celebrity seems balanced on a shaky pinnacle! On the other hand, they might admire someone's achievement arrived at over a long haul and well deserved. While such achievement may indeed be admirable, we need to move beyond merely personal and superficial kinds of judgments, which look at success from a limited standpoint. The scientific fact is that God's sons and daughters are at the loftiest heights of achievement always. And this is the true identity of each of us—no one is left out. We're God's great success, we could say. We are wonderfully elevated in the hierarchy of being because we are the spiritual expression of God, of illimitable good. On the human scene, then, a God-reflecting quality of thought is more an indication of success than worldly position.
