Good morning friends! âïž
I know British people complain about the weather all the time, but this week it has been unbelievably dreadful. So much for âspring.â
Anyway, today I want to speak about a video that struck a chord with me, and I hope it does so with you.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03e2f1dd-a6d2-40d0-92e8-f93a9c48ea69_940x400.png)
How do we define success?
This is the question I was left asking myself after watching the video Why You Feel Behind in Life (Financially) by Damien Talks Money. I highly recommend you check it out, but I want to discuss the message I got from it and some of its key points.
Most people correlate money with success. There is some evidence to this, to be a successful businessman, your business should be making money. As a stock trader, you are measured by the money you bring in.
However, correlation does not equal causation. Sometimes success equals money, but this is not always the case.
A question I want to ask is, who is the highest-grossing actor of all time? You will never get it. This actor has made $30,601,574,433 from their films, yet never had a leading role.
It is Stan Lee.Â
I am sure many of you may not know who he is, but he is the creator and writer behind Marvel. He starred for a few seconds in several films, and as the creator, he took a hefty cut of their profits.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say most people donât think Stan Lee is the best actor they have seen.
I think acting and theatre is one of the few examples where we donât immediately correlate money with success. If you look at the top 20 grossing actors list, several actors and actresses people consider to be the âbestâ are not on the list. The likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep are not there.
A successful actor or actress makes people feel something and captures the audience's emotions. Itâs not all about how many dollars you can bring in.
Success is more individualistic than we give credit for. It depends on your background, education, location, and a myriad of other things. There is no point in trying to compare yourself to others as itâs just a stupid exercise. Comparison is really the thief of joy.
With that said, how do we measure if we are improving over time?Â
Well, I think Matthew McConaughey had the answer in his Best Actor speech at the 2014 Oscars.
At 15, McConaughey was asked who was his hero. He didnât have the answer. So, he thought about it and then was asked the question again. Do you know what his reply was?
My hero is me in 10 years.
10 years later, he was asked if he was a hero. He replied that he wasnât âeven closeâ and that his hero would know him in 10 years.
You can read into this how you want, but to me, it means that the only person you should measure your success against is yourself.Â
Whatâs Been Cooking đ„
Some tasty stories this week:
OpenAI, Tumblr, and WordPress Colab â The parent company of Tumblr and WordPress is in talks with OpenAI to provide AI training data from their posts.
Genie: Image-to-Video Game  â Googleâs DeepMind released a model called Genie which can build full interactive games from text prompts.
Musk Sues OpenAI â Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, a company for which he was a co-founder because it has breached the principles from its founding in 2015.
Weekly Favourites â€ïž
đšÂ Tool â Rectangle Mac. A tool I use every day that helps me manipulate my window sizes straight from my keys.
đŹÂ YouTube â Why You Feel Behind in Life (Financially). Now I canât write this post and not add the video itâs based on as one of my favorites!
đšÂ Tool â Python Poetry. I have recently moved my package and environment manager to Poetry from Anaconda. I prefer how lightweight and less intrusive it is on my machine.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you đ)