What Does Success Mean To You? What I’ve Learned From Executives, Leaders, Artists, MBAs & Students

What does success mean to you? It’s a question I have thought about a lot. I strongly believe the question doesn’t mean anything without the “to you” at the end. “What does success mean” means absolutely nothing on its own.

As a former actor and artist turned business person and podcaster, my favorite thing to do is hear people’s stories.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews. I’ve talked with executives from the biggest tech and entertainment companies, Broadway stars and Emmy Winners, my peers, leaders from all levels, and students seeking advice. It is my mission to pay forward this generosity of spirit in the hopes that something about my work helps you reflect on your uniqueness so that you build a career path that is fulfilling to you.

When I think back on my time as an actor, which was my entire early career, I feel like I’m talking about an entirely different person. My life used to be lugging my audition book around at 5am to stand in line for five hours to sing for 30 seconds – in the hopes that someone decided I was “good enough” or “right enough” to hire me.

Success to me then always felt so out of reach – and how I thought about success then is completely unrelated to how I think about it now. All of these conversations and stories have brought so much value to my life and shifted my perspective on how I see the big picture. I share all of these perspectives to show how different people think about what drives them – so that at the end, you are hopefully inspired to think about your own motivators.

When I read through these quotes – what stands out to me is each person’s strong character, and it leaves me contemplating how freeing it would be if we all embraced what we uniquely want.

I have spent months deep in thought on this topic. Here is what I am left believing. Every person views this concept differently – based on their own experiences – and therefore, every person should be measuring success differently. I am the person that determines whether I am “successful” or not. It is my responsibility to create the stepping stones to get to where I want to be. Anytime I try to measure myself against someone else’s standards, I muddy the waters. And I think the same for you. I have been in enough industries that draw you into the comparison trap to know it’s not the place to be – and I hope that something about this piece helps you get out of the trap and into your own authenticity.

What does success mean to you?

Suba Vasudevan – COO of Mozilla.org and SVP at Mozilla Corp
“When I was younger in my career, I wanted to be in the big leagues. Now I just want to reshape the game.

“That’s easier to say when you’ve hit a certain stage of your career. It’s so much harder to say when you’re younger in your career, because without that aspiration to keep climbing up the career ladder, you don’t get to reshape the game. So there’s a little bit of a caveat there. Success is about building systems that might outlive you, your calendar or the leadership team that you have today. When the culture, the company and the systems that you helped shape, make better decisions even when you’re not in the room, that’s success. I’m conscious that I’m speaking from the perspective of a senior tenured leader, and this doesn’t necessarily resonate for everybody. But if you think of your north star in those terms, that’s a very different definition of success than just getting to the next promotion and the next promotion.

“It’s very easy to ship products. Shipping products is easy. Shipping products that shift generations, and entire economies is hard. You sometimes need to be in the right place at the right time for that. But shipping what shapes entire systems for decades to come is hardest.

“Everybody can do that in their own little way, whether it’s a non-profit you work for or whether it’s the extremely tenured executive leadership role that you’re in at a large company. That’s my view on success.”

Jill Furman – Theatrical Producer

“It’s such a good question. I could stop now and feel like I had done it – that I’ve accomplished everything that I wanted to, and be very proud. But I think there are so many more stories that need to be told, and I want to help to tell them. I think it’s a very personal word, and certainly has different meanings for different people. I want to do what I’m proud of. If I can make some sort of difference in someone’s life, whether it’s someone in the audience, whether it’s someone on stage, could be both – that to me makes me feel like I’ve been successful.”

Carla Stickler – Web Engineer at Spotify | Former Broadway Actor | Educator
“To me, success means being able to enjoy the time I have when I’m not working. To have the comfort in knowing that the career I’ve chosen allows me to travel, be present with my family, and not worry about having health insurance. I thought success meant fame, ‘making it’ on Broadway, doing a job that I was passionate about. But, I did that and it came at a huge cost to my personal life. I had no work life balance and began to resent my passion. I’m sure there are others out there that have both and feel differently than I do, but for me, having a career that was so tied to my identity meant that I could never turn it off. Now, while I really enjoy my job, I love that when I’m clocked out, I’m not thinking about it. Instead, I’m taking my kid to the zoo and giving him my full focus. At times, I miss performing, but the wonderful thing about the place I’ve reached in my life and career, is that if I want to find ways to sing or create art, I have the ability to make space for it in ways that still allow me to have balance. That feels like success; getting to choose how you spend your time.”

Cheryl Chotrani – Senior Director, Business Strategy at Salesforce | Social Entrepreneur | Investor
“To me, success is about alignment – between my values, my goals, and how I spend my time. Every choice we make about where to invest our time is a tradeoff, and when those decisions reflect what matters most to us, that indicates success. It isn’t defined solely by titles or financial milestones—although those can be markers of success if they align with a person’s values. For me, success means having the freedom to live a life of purpose, dedicating time to what I value most: supporting and uplifting others, being present for my son, and creating space for meaningful work that has a positive impact on people, companies, and ultimately society.”

Vicki Dobbs Beck – Immersive Storytelling Innovator & Leader | Lucasfilm Executive | Stanford MBA
“Now that I’m preparing to retire from full-time employment after 34 years with Lucasfilm, I have a much better understanding of what success means to me. Looking back, what I value most is having the courage to innovate, reimagine and pioneer – especially in terms of storytelling and emerging media platforms. It’s really not about the title or the money, it is being passionate about the work and the people with whom I’m collaborating. I’ve had the good fortune to be early in the immersive entertainment space and in doing so, I’ve been able to be a part of the future. Hopefully, in that process, I’ve had a chance to touch lives and inspire others to pursue their dreams.”

KC Muñoz – Strategy Manager at Music Theatre International | Columbia MBA | Former Consultant
“Success means looking inward, figuring out what makes you happy, and intentionally building a life around that. For a long time, I felt pressure to fulfill a specific role in my family, the pragmatic eldest daughter. It didn’t feel heavy at first; I was good at checking boxes and putting others first. But over time, the weight of everyone else’s expectations became too much to carry. When you do what you love, life feels lighter, but getting there isn’t easy. Pursuing what I truly care about was terrifying because I had a real fear of failure. It’s one thing to fall short at something you’re not invested in; it’s easier to walk away and pretend it didn’t matter. But pouring your heart into something meaningful? That’s a much bigger risk. For me, success has meant pushing past that fear and choosing the path that feels right. As women, we’re pulled in so many directions, career, marriage, family, ambition, independence. It’s practically impossible to nurture all of it at once, and therefore becomes so easy to lose yourself in the process. Throughout my career and education, I’ve learned that the most empowering thing you can do is get to know yourself, trust yourself, and bet on yourself. When I think of the generations of Latinas in my family, my mom, my grandmother, and those before them, I think about all they fought for so I could have more choices. The way I choose to honor their sacrifices is by choosing a future that’s right for me, even if it doesn’t look like what society may define as ‘successful.’ That, to me, is what success really is.”

Kim Pallister – Senior Director, Corporate Strategy at Sony Interactive Entertainment
“I think that most people, hopefully, come to learn over time that success isn’t defined by the money one makes, or the trappings that come with it. Beyond a certain threshold, it becomes far less meaningful. Having a purpose, and engineering a path for one’s self to be able to work toward that purpose, is far more important. And given that the journey itself is the destination, ensuring that you are on that path with people you respect, learn from, and enjoy being with, ensure that you’ll have achieved success even as you are on the path toward your goal, not only when you reach it.”

Shelley Zalis – Founder & CEO, The Female Quotient
“Success has always meant one thing to me: being truly happy with what I have. And for me, that’s my family. I’ve always lived by a ‘no regret’ policy when it comes to my kids. They know they come first. I tell them: You let me know what matters to you and I’ll be there.

“The meetings I skipped? The business trips I passed on? No one remembers. But the moments that mattered to my children, I was there. And that’s what counts.”

Chris Melissinos – Video Game Industry Veteran and Preservationist
“Success to me means the same thing that it has always meant to me – which is, when I get up in the morning and I look in the mirror, do I like the person that I see? And to not be so trite about that, nobody’s going to remember the car you drove when you leave this Earth.

“Right? But what they will remember, hopefully, is the kind of person you were, whether or not you were able to help them. Did you leave the world a better place when you got here? Did you help to change things to be better? And that is something that I have tried to emulate and present throughout my whole life because that is the way that I feel.

“I remember telling my kids, if you care enough about something in the world and you find people with as much passion as you, you can do great things. And that is what success is to me – are the things I’m doing impacting the people that I meet in a positive way? Is it making the world a better place in some small way?”

Jared Ben – Head of Content Partnerships Canva
“Success isn’t a job title, it’s finding something that truly fulfills you. Working with great people on great products or causes is a great place to start. If you genuinely love your work, success will find you.”

Stella Offner – Astrophysicist, University of Texas at Austin | Director of NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins | UC Berkeley PhD
“Success means being able to wake up every day and choose your work. Ideally, this means choosing to continue working on what you are working on. But it could also mean going in a completely new and thrilling professional direction!”

Stacey Strickland – Director, Cloud Solution Architecture, AIBS
“Success, to me, is about living out values with intention and impact. It’s not just about achieving goals, but about aligning my actions with my values, growing through challenges, learning from failures, and making a meaningful difference in the lives of others. Success isn’t a destination – it’s a journey of purpose, progress, and never giving up.”

Celeste Bean – ML Engineer & Founder | Stanford MBA Candidate
“My version of success is a daily alignment with my values, and I hold myself to a rubric of compassion, curiosity, sincerity, and diligence (and don’t always succeed!). David Brooks describes the difference between ‘résumé virtues’ and ‘eulogy virtues,’ where the latter describes what people will talk about at your funeral. In low moments, the accomplishments I’d post on LinkedIn don’t comfort me. Rather, the times I’ve lived my values, especially when it was challenging to do so, remind me of my worth. I find that the failures that linger aren’t missed promotions or failed projects, but the times I let myself or the people I love down. At the end of life, no one asks for their bonus history or deal toy shelf. They ask: Did I show up? Did I care? Did I grow?”

Aditya Mahajan – Physical AI at NVIDIA | Board at Seamless Bay Area | Kellogg | IIT Delhi
“Success is a reward on the bigger journey, a milestone that encourages you to keep persevering. It’s not the final destination, but a signpost that your effort, discipline, and vision are paying off. And importantly, success is never just for one person – it’s a collective achievement. In fact, the more people celebrating, the better it gets. At work, it happens when our teams launch products that unlock new, complex problem-solving capabilities for physical AI researchers around the world. At my sports club, it’s when one of our teams wins a state or national tournament and the entire club gets energized, inspired to dream bigger. With family and friends, it’s when someone you’ve supported – whether in their life situation, work, or hobbies – leap forward in their endeavor.”

Laethitia Patadji, CFA – Equity Research Analyst | Columbia MBA | ex Citigroup
“To me, success means living life on my own terms – being intentional with what I can control, and learning not to stress over what I can’t. It’s about exploring different facets of life to understand my boundaries, staying open to evolving beliefs as I gain new perspective, and learning to forgive others as generously as I forgive myself. Success isn’t always about reaching the end goal, but about knowing I gave it everything I had and showed up fully. It means carving space for joy, for loved ones, and for self-reflection – and being able to look back with peace, knowing I did the best I could with the information I had at the time.”

Alvin Wang Graylin – Author, Our Next Reality | Digital Fellow, Stanford HAI | Chairman, Virtual World Society
“Success isn’t a fixed destination; it’s an ever-unfolding journey. As we deepen our knowledge, wisdom, and influence, success grows with us – in the positive difference we make for the people and communities around us. Rather than chasing a one-size-fits-all benchmark, true success is giving your utmost to leave every sphere you touch better than you found it. When individuals adopt this mindset – balancing personal well-being with meaningful impact – we don’t just achieve individual fulfillment; together we build a thriving, successful civilization.”

Isaac Sundsted – Director of Gaming Partnerships & Strategy – Samsung
“Ultimately I think I will judge my success on my ability to feel confident that I left it a better place than it was when I came into it. I think – and this is true for personal and professional life – we’re all living in this same shared garden. It should be our duty and privilege to garden the space around us, to weed, and leave it better for the next person, help somebody else, extend the ladder, put out a hand, and bring people forward. I think if I can look back and say that I’ve done that, I’m going to feel very very good about myself. I measure that tactically in career. This goes all the way back to wanting to go into a new career out of interpreting that would let me scale. My goals for myself are now to increase my ability to have that impact. The scope of that impact – I want to be able go from an individual level to a group level to a large level, using our powers for good, and making it genuinely better for the next person to come along. That’s the value – and then the tactical bit of it is to expand my scope of impact so I can do that on a larger scale, and then everything else will work out.”

Yvoire Whittaker – Brand Marketing Lead at Nike, MBA from Columbia Business School
“I just started a book actually called The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women. I’m only on chapter two, but chapter one starts out with talking about what does success even mean and what does success look like, because so many people break themselves on a scale of not successful to successful. And they don’t even know what that success means to them.

“They’re just going arbitrarily based off of someone else’s ‘look’ of success. So you see how all of these people are ‘successful,’ which is typically tied to a monetary value or fame or something like that. Growing up, that’s what you think too. But I think it is important as you matriculate and go along life to really define that for yourself. Because as I get older, success is a lot less about money. I took a pay cut coming from Deloitte to Nike, but I’m so much happier and I’m so much more fulfilled.

“And so I would say my definition of success is listening to myself, trying new things unapologetically in the way that looks authentic to me, and chasing my own happiness, whatever that looks like. And I would say if I can do those three things, I’ve lived a successful life.”

Paige Lord – Founder, Just AI | Responsible AI Expert | Senior Product Marketing Manager, GitHub
“Success is the ability to achieve your goals and dreams, or make meaningful movement in that direction. It’s not strictly limited to a dollar amount or a title. If you’re able to achieve your goals and dreams without those things, you’re still a success by your own standards. I’ve achieved lofty dreams that nobody in my family has achieved before – like graduating from college. I’ve also achieved material dreams like buying a house. But what I’m most proud of is my commitment to my own personal growth in my career, life, and relationships. I consider these things to be markers of success, not because someone else set the bar, but because I set those goals and worked to make them a reality.”

Gideon Spitzer-Williams – Global Experiential Marketing Lead at Canva. Alumni of Snapchat, Tinder, Red Bull, MBA @ UCLA
“Success isn’t about constant wins. It’s about falling off the horse, getting curious, and coming back better. That’s where the magic and most importantly the growth and fulfillment happen.”

Corissa Maggard – Student at UT Austin | Development Intern at Rubi Legal Training | Customer Service Professional
“I don’t think there is a milestone or achievement that would make me feel truly successful. Success, to me, means feeling proud of how I show up in the world and the footprint I leave behind – not just what I can achieve. It’s about always staying curious, intentional, and building a life that reflects my values rather than others’ expectations. To be successful is to be aligned with yourself; between the choices and consistency of your values, your actions, and your impact. I don’t measure my enduring worth by my productivity, but by whether I trust that I’m listening, learning, and growing into the fullest version of myself. There’s no single moment that defines success for me; it’s only the quiet confidence that I’m on a path that feels honest and meaningful. A satisfying journey holds far more value to me than any ambitious trophy.”

Eitamar Nadler – Corporate Strategy & Development, Sony Interactive Entertainment | Booth MBA
“Success = time well spent. Time is the most foundational currency. You can turn it into almost anything if you invest enough of it – money, a good job, a work of art, a relationship, a community, a quick dopamine hit, regret. So spending it properly on what matters to you is how you get what you want out of life. The trick is figuring out what future you is going to value, because they’ll have to deal with all your time investments and the trade-offs you made.”

Ismet Jooma – Marketing Manager, Guardian News & Media | NYU Stern MBA
“Success, to me, means living a life rooted in purpose, values, and joy. To be successful is to contribute meaningfully to the world – leaving it better than before – whilst staying true to principles like progress, community, and personal growth. In practice, living ‘successfully’ has meant working to enrich both society and self.”

Putting it all together

We often pressure ourselves to see success as something superficial. But it actually has so much depth and nuance. Success isn’t one moment – you don’t do one thing and then feel “successful.” The conventional definitions of success that you see on social media come with a cost, and they’re often not even real.

After writing this piece, speaking to all these generous people, the concept I leave thinking the most deeply about is time. I try to think about how I am spending my time every day – and whether I am staying true to my values and following my intuition. I remind myself everyday just how precious time is.

What success means to me is being intentional with how I spend my time, using it in ways that make me feel alive, reflecting deeply on my values so that I spend more time on what matters to me, and focusing on being present and grateful. I’m committed to letting go of any measure of success that doesn’t come authentically from me, and to following my own compass.

I hope this piece leaves you reflecting on your own values, and feeling a little closer to the one voice that matters most: your own.

Jane Cortez (formerly Jane Bernhard) is the host and creator of the podcast Your Career, Unscripted, where she interviews business leaders and rising leaders on their career stories to inspire you to build a career on your terms. She has an MBA from Columbia Business School and has recently been published by CNN, Poets & Quants, and the Austin Chronicle. She is the Communications Director of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI) at the University of Texas. She has interviewed hundreds of leaders in technology and media. She is a frequent guest speaker in schools on networking and building your own path. After making her own pivot from acting to business, she founded a career and strategy consulting company to help others navigate meaningful career changes. If you’re considering a career change and need guidance, want to strengthen your professional story, or create your own opportunities, she offers one-on-one advising – feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn.

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