Randy Polito has noticed something about how people measure success.
They look at external wins. Promotions. Money. Recognition. Achievements you can point to. And if those are there, they should be happy, right? They should feel successful.
Except they don't. They feel empty.
Meanwhile, someone else with fewer external wins feels genuinely accomplished. Feels successful. Feels like they've actually achieved something.
The difference isn't in the wins. It's in the internal standard.
Randy Polito thinks success is a state of mind, not a collection of wins. You can be objectively succeeding by every external measure—lapping the field, exceeding goals, hitting targets—and still feel like you're underachieving because your internal standard is different from reality.
Here's what Randy Polito has learned: everyone measures success differently. Your metric might be completely different from society's metric. Your neighbor's metric might be completely different from yours. And that's okay.
The problem comes when your internal standard is so far from reality that you can't see what you've actually accomplished. When you've done remarkable work and you can't give yourself credit for it because you're measuring against an impossible standard.
This is where it gets dangerous. Because at some point, the struggle stops being motivation and grit. It starts being anger. It starts being spite. It starts bleeding into other aspects of your life and projecting onto other people.
When Randy Polito sees that shift, he knows the internal standard has become self-destructive.
Here's what he believes: success is real when it aligns with your actual goals and values, not when it matches someone else's definition. You get to decide what winning looks like. You get to set the bar.
But here's the hard part: you have to be honest about where the bar actually is. You have to be able to see what you've done and give yourself credit for it. Not falsely. Not complacently. But honestly.
Because the alternative—chasing an internal standard so high that nothing ever satisfies it—will destroy you. It will turn your ambition into anger. It will turn your drive into spite. And it will make everyone around you miserable.
Randy Polito thinks the most successful people he knows aren't the ones who won the most. They're the ones who've figured out what success actually means to them, and they've given themselves permission to feel it when they achieve it.
That's internal success. And that's the only kind that actually matters.
— Randy Polito