Defining Success: The Distortions I Learned In Childhood

How do you TRULY define success?

My parents did Amway when I was a kid, you know, one of those early multi-level marketing companies that sold stuff like vitamins and home products. Their messaging was all focused on "going Diamond" (getting to the top of the *cough* pyramid) and "being free", by getting people to sign up for the company underneath you so you'd get a portion of their sales, and so on.

I kinda forgot about all that shit until I moved to a permanent home in DC last summer. My mom brought down boxes of stuff from my childhood and in the Amway pile there was all kinds of crazy propaganda. Among photos of fancy cars and parties of them at mansions, the golden carrots they were fed, I found some interesting stuff.

The worst of which was a children's book basically explaining why your parents had to travel so much and that you needed to support their goal of "going Diamond". On the last page we see the happy family happy on a yacht, hugging and gazing into the sunset. I also found a drawing I had done of a happy-looking girl in stylish clothes with the words "I'm free" across the chest.

I also found a pamphlet on something they called "Compassionate Capitalism" which makes my democratic-socialist stomach lurch with nausea. I have to wonder, now, what all of this did to my psyche. From an early age, was I unintentionally taught to tie my self-worth and success to being rich and "free"?

Is this possibly a contributing factor as to why I sometimes (ok, often) feel like a failure at age 30 since I'm nowhere near financial stability? So, how do you define success?

When you really sit down and think about it, is it something that you learned from your environment, your parents, or your peers?

Or is success something that you've dug deep into and actively determined on your own?