I hear stories about a time when the measure of a successful life was to earn a good living and take care of your family. Period. There were no personal goals, time was not explicitly spent on self-improvement, and few people had a "life's work". From what I can gather, you found a good job, worked at it, and tried to be a good person for your family and community.
While that's probably an over-simplified version, I am stunned at how much more we've added to the measure of success. It's no longer enough to simply make a good living and be a good person.
My theory is that making a good living and being a good person became too easy to achieve, and, collectively, we grew bored. The 1950s focused on getting more stuff, the 1960s on having more impact on the world, and so on for the next 40 years. Every generation found something to strive for above and beyond a good living and being a good person.
Well, I'm tired of it. For the last few months, I've been agonizing that I haven't written anything creative. Because, if I want to get better at writing, I need to practice. And, to have a successful life, I need to do something outside of my job that means something, right? No, I need to do things that make me happy. My personal measure of a successful life is did I have fun living? If not, I did something wrong.
After that realization, I wanted to write again. Not because I thought I would improve my writing skills, or because I had a great story to tell, but because it's fun. It's fun to dream up people and places and put them together and see what happens; it's fun to imagine "what if" and see where it takes me.
It's my life, so if I get to decide what makes it a "success". As the band The Clarks sang, "when you're making the rules, there's no way to finish last."