O TO BE A SUCCESS!
II Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
By Dr. David Rogne

Sol Hurok, the concert impresario, tells of being present one day when a reporter interviewed the concert singer, Marian Anderson. The reporter asked her to name the greatest moment in her life. Hurok says, "I was in her dressing room at the time and was curious to hear the answer. I knew she had many big moments to choose from. There was the night Toscanini told her that hers was the finest voice of the century. There was the private concert she gave at the White House for the President and the King and Queen of England. She had received the Bok Award as the person who had done the most for her home town, Philadelphia. To top it all, there was the Easter Sunday in Washington when she stood beneath the Lincoln statue and sang for a crowd of 75,000, which included Cabinet members, Supreme Court Justices, and most members of Congress." Which of those big moments did she choose? "None of them," says Hurok. "Miss Anderson told the reporter that the greatest moment of her life was the day she went home and told her mother that the mother wouldn't have to take in washing any more." For her, what constituted success was clear and simple.

Success is something every one of us is interested in attaining. God seems to have made us with a desire to succeed, but how to succeed often eludes us.

People who seem to have it made are not always helpful as to how to go about it. A newspaper reporter was interviewing a wealthy old rancher and asked him to what he would attribute his success as a rancher. With a twinkle in his eye the man replied; "It's been about 50 percent weather, 50 percent good luck, and the rest is brains." A local businessman was being presented with a Man of the Year Award. At the presentation dinner he was asked, "To what do you attribute your prosperous success?" "Five things contributed to my success," answered the man. "First, I always treated people fairly. Second, I always offered a fair price. Third, I was always honest. Fourth, I was always generous to my employees. And fifth, my Aunt Edna died a few years back and left me two and a half million dollars." J. Paul Getty was scarcely any more helpful. When asked the secret of his success he said, "Some people find oil. Others don't." Not much help there.

In the reading from Paul's letter to Timothy, Paul acknowledges that he is coming to the end of his life, but he faces that end victoriously, as a runner who is successfully finishing a race. Where does success lie?

The first thing that occurs to me is that some people are looking for success in the wrong places, and they are not being satisfied. One area of life from which people hope to experience success is in their work. Sometimes, in our desire to succeed, everything is done for the good of the company. For some, it works, and they move up. For others, it leads to disappointment. I read about a man who, over a twenty-five year period, was encouraged to give his all to the company, with the understanding that one day he would become vice president. When the position finally opened, it was given to the boss's nephew who hadn't even worked with the company, because, they said, "they wanted to bring in new blood." The man had only the taste of ashes in his mouth after twenty-five years.

Some do attain the prize, but at great personal cost. Dr. Kenneth Pelletier did a five-year study of executives from fourteen major corporations. The study revealed that only seven percent of the "successful" executives felt they were leading the good life that success was supposed to provide. Ninety-three percent felt they had given up important aspects of their lives to get to the top. They suffered from ill health and broken personal and family relationships, which made it difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy their success. In a book entitled A Passion for Excellence, the authors confront the question, "Is it possible to have it all--a full and satisfying personal life and a full and satisfying, hard-working professional one?" Their answer is "No. The price of excellence is time, energy, attention, and focus, at the very same time that energy, attention, and focus could have gone into enjoying your daughter's soccer game. Excellence is a high-cost item."

If who you are is equated with what you do, then who are you when there is a lay-off, or when you retire? Somebody pointed out that "No one, on his deathbed, ever said, "I wish I had spent more time on my business.'"

Sometimes, those who are successful in their work discover that they are not satisfied with what they have become. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, made a fortune by inventing more powerful explosives and licensing the formula to governments to make weapons. One day, Nobel's brother died, and one newspaper by accident printed an obituary notice for Alfred instead. It identified him as the inventor of dynamite and the man who made a fortune by enabling armies to achieve new levels of mass destruction. Nobel had the unique opportunity to read his own obituary in his lifetime and to see what he would be remembered for. He was shocked to think that this was what his life would add up to: to be remembered as a merchant of death and destruction. He took his fortune and used it to establish the awards for accomplishments in various fields which would benefit humanity, and it is for that, not for his explosives, that he is remembered today. When Nobel was at his most "successful," he was working against life and against friendship. Then he realized what he would leave behind if that were all he did, and he gave the last part of his life another direction. Success in our work is not the final determinant of success.

A second way people gauge their success is by what they own. We've seen bumper stickers that say "The one who dies with the most toys wins." When I lived in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, I noticed a business called "The Price of His Toys." I thought it was a high-priced toy shop. As a matter of fact, it was. The toys were Rolls Royces, Porches, Chris-Craft boats, jet skis, and Piper airplanes. The kinds of toys big boys collect. One of my near neighbors was Dr. Armand Hammer, who is reported to have said, "Money is my first, last, and only love." Dr. Hammer, fortunately, shared a good deal of his wealth with the public. There were many neighbors who, I am sure, shared his feeling, but not his generosity.

Acquisition can leave us feeling empty. Shortly before his death in 1991, Republican presidential campaign advisor, Lee Atwater, lamented: "The '80s were about acquiring--acquiring wealth, power, and prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty." He took note of what he called "the spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society," which he called "the tumor of our soul."

I read about a father who was invited by his family to join in a game of Monopoly. He confessed he had not played a game of Monopoly for fifteen years or so. Before long, however, a bit of the old excitement and enthusiasm came back. Everything was going his way and he became master of the board. He owned Boardwalk and Park Place, plus houses and hotels all around. The family was squirming as he was busy stuffing $500 bills into his pocket. Suddenly the game was over. He had won. His wife and children retired to bed, leaving him to put everything back into the box. Then he was struck with an empty feeling. All of the excitement he had experienced earlier was unfounded. He didn't own any more than those he had defeated. It all had to go back into the box. But he recognized that the game of Monopoly provided parallels with the game of life. "All through life we struggle to accumulate, to buy and own, possess and refinance. Then we suddenly come to the end of life and have to put everything back into the box. We can't take a cent with us. There are no moving vans that accompany us through the Valley of the Shadow." Suddenly, the success that is usually equated with acquiring things was put into a new perspective.

Another way people seek success is through competition. We want to be winners. Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, spoke not only for himself, but for the American psyche when he said, "Winning isn't everything . . . . It's the only thing." Coupled with that is the observation by Leo Durocher that "Nice guys finish last." Winning becomes all important. If you can't be a nice guy and a winner, nice guy has to go. Our new beatitude is "Blessed are the aggressive, for they shall reach the top." Norman Mailer once wrote that "everyone (is) out for all the power he can get at every minute of the day, and that from the most casual confrontation between two people, one emerges with a victory and the other with a defeat." Such attitudes may create powerful people who are looked up to as successful--but it is devastating in the family, in the community, in the church, in the workplace, because it requires that there be losers. It is devastating also to the personality of the successful ones who can now look out over the top of the crowd only to discover that the view is not that much different. They've arrived, but where? They've made it, but who have they become?

In Homer's classic work, The Odyssey, Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, is returning from victory in the Trojan War when he becomes involved in a series of adventures that delay his return. Ten years after the end of the war, Odysseus and his friends have still not returned home, preferring instead to sail from island to island engaging in a fantastic series of adventures, successfully fighting giants, monsters, gods, and goddesses. Though his wife and son are waiting faithfully at home, Odysseus is swept up in the adventure of what he is doing and the thrill of his victories. Eventually he sails to the very edge of the world and enters the dark regions of Hades, where he meets the shadowy souls of the dead. He meets all the great Greek heroes of the past only to discover that in death they are as nothing. This becomes a confrontation with his own future, and he emerges from Hades as a changed person. He sees that his competitiveness, challenges, and victories will mean little when he must enter the place of the dead. He determines to head for home and the loving relationships that have finally become the truly enduring qualities of his life. For some people it is an accident, for others a death, for still others a bankruptcy that brings them to an awareness that where they have been looking for success is not the most rewarding place to look.

This brings me to the other thing I want to do this morning, which is to look at some of the things that make success meaningful. For one thing, we have to have goals. Once Aldous Huxley was late for an important meeting in Dublin, Ireland. He jumped into a cab and yelled, "Drive fast!" Away went the cab, jolting over the streets. After a while he asked the driver, "Do you know where you are going?" "No, I don't," said the driver, "but we're getting there fast." Success is in relation to a goal. If we don't have a goal, we can't know whether we are succeeding.

But the goal doesn't have to involve beating someone else. AT&T has produced a training film depicting the running of a marathon in a small town. The film focuses on several of the runners. A young woman has chosen as her goal for the day to better her best time by a few seconds. A young man is not concerned with time--he simply hopes to finish the race--something he has never done before. Another young man wants to go for broke. He is not sure he can win, but he is intrigued by reaching down inside himself to see how good he really is. The gun sounds and all three take off. None of them is the first to finish, but the young woman betters her best time, the first young man finishes the race, and the other young man has pushed himself to a new level. Each runner has a different finish line--the goal each one set--and each is a winner. Success is decided by goals inside ourselves.

We also need to recognize that as life-circumstances change, our goals need to change. Astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin returned from space as a hero, but was eventually hospitalized for severe depression, became an alcoholic, divorced his wife, remarried, and separated from his second wife. He knocked about in a series of jobs. In his book, Return to Earth, he says that his life had been a series of goals. But after achieving what he and everyone seemed to regard as the ultimate goal--walking on the moon--he wondered to himself, "What could I do next? What possible goal could I add now? There simply wasn't one, and without a goal," he says, "I was like an inert ping-pong ball being batted about by the whims and motivations of others."

For us, a change of goals may be called for because our circumstances have changed. We wanted to pay off the house, and we have. We wanted to raise healthy children, and we have. We wanted our teenagers to turn out well, and whether they have or not, we don't have the responsibility any more, and the goal by which we measured success is no longer appropriate. One woman lamented to a counselor, "Everything that makes life worth living for me is either turning gray, drying up, or leaving home." What she, and the rest of us, needs to be prepared for is that the old must pass away before the new can come. Nietzsche provides a sobering reminder when he says, "Only where there are graves are there resurrections." Only where the old self is breaking up can the new self, with new goals and new measures of success, be born.

All of which leads me to say that the real test of success is found within us. Success is not a matter of what becomes of us, but of who we become. Einstein saw that when he said, "Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value." H. G. Wells wrote that "Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a person is and what that person might be."

I was at a funeral for a Jewish man a while back when one of the persons present stood up to affirm that the deceased man was a real "mensch." I knew enough German to know that that was simply the word for "man." But after the service some of the attendants pointed out to me that the word had been heightened in Yiddish to mean a "Genuine Human Being"--one who lived up to his potential. In our tradition we might have used the term "a real Christian." In any tradition, success in life is related to fulfilling our potential--becoming the person God wants us to be. For Paul it did not always involve emerging triumphant. There were things he could have done better. But when life was drawing to a close, he was satisfied with his success: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." God would bless his achievements.

Ann Landers carried something in one of her columns which she attributed to Bessie Anderson Stanley, and with this I close.

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better place than we found it, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”