What is success? For the cormorant fisherman in China it is catching enough food with his bird to feed his family. For the chief executive of a large multinational corporation it is providing his investors with a suitable return on their investment. For an athlete it is running the course a fraction of a second faster than the previous day. For the tired mother it is watching with satisfaction her baby sleeping soundly in its cot at night. How do you define it?



Success, or the lack of it, is often seen as one of the deciding factors of an individual's happiness. Yet, given the subjective nature of the idea of success, perhaps any unhappiness due to lack of success is simply the result of wrong-thinking. Perhaps success is more a case of seeing what you do have and what you have achieved than dwelling on the things that you do not have and that you have not achieved.

Television, advertising, the movies, the media, are constantly bombarding us with images of impossible, unattainable success. The physical perfection of those models and actors we are faced with every day cannot but make us feel inadequate. The gleaming sports cars, the palatial houses, the fine designer clothes and the perfect human beings that populate our movies, our television screens, and our glossy society magazines make our own lives, our own situations, seem shabby and worthless.

If we were daily bombarded with images of failure, of disease, of ugliness and despair, we might paradoxically feel better about our own situations and our own lives. Yet the television producers, the advertising executives, the movie directors, and the newspaper editors are only giving us the things that we ourselves ask for. Our lives are dull and depressing enough without us masochistically heaping more woes upon ourselves. We want to be able to escape from our lives, if only for a while, and fantasise how things might have been were we not so inadequate physically and mentally. And so by our very quest for an escape from our own unsuccessful lives, we actually make ourselves feel worse about ourselves and our situation than we otherwise might.

To feel better about ourselves we need to stop yearning for impossible dreams. We need to sit alone in a quiet place devoid of the distractions that we so eagerly use to stop ourselves from seeing ourselves. And in the quiet, away from the fantasies of an unreal world, we need to look at ourselves, and see ourselves for what we really are. Only then, when we know ourselves, will we be able to understand our place in the world.

"Shallow Hal" starring Jack Black, is a wonderfully funny, thought-provoking film that demonstrates the importance of seeing beyond the external to the beauty that lies within all of us. Convinced by a hypnotherapist, while trapped in a lift, that everyone, regardless of external appearance, is beautiful, Black's character, Hal, embarks on a life-changing adventure. Even when the spell is broken and he sees those he thought of as externally beautiful for what they are, Hal finally realises that beauty is indeed more than skin deep.

So the next time you're tempted to judge someone or something by what they look like on the outside, try to put yourself on the inside were the reality lies. The next time you find yourself considering yourself to be unsuccessful, take stock of the things you have achieved, however small, and other things you have. We can't all be Brad Pitt or Nicole Kidman, we can't all be Bill Gates or Richard Branson, but we can all be ourselves. As Polonius said to his son Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet, "this above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

If we can get beyond the idea that external appearance is everything, and can come to understand, as the character Hal did, that the truth that lies behind the external is far more important, we will find ourselves much closer to success than we ever dreamt possible. And if we can do the same for ourselves; can look inside ourselves, can find ourselves, and then can be true to who and what we are, we may even find that we are already more successful than we could have ever imagined.