In summary, what are your thoughts on what it takes to be successful?

[Gentle_Idiot]

I personally would say the criteria for success are Twitter followers, material wealth, physical strength (for men), raw beauty (for women), accumulated skills, and number of close friends.

I confess I find this list surprising.

Twitter is a unique environment and has its own idiosyncrasies for becoming popular. You could easily judge the success of a person's efforts to become Twitter-famous. But there are people who by most reasonable measures are successful people, yet have few followers. 

For example, I follow a guy who is pretty much top of his field in an obscure academic specialty. He speaks five or six languages, travels to all kinds of interesting places, and publishes new findings regularly. He also lives in a very beautiful Italian town. He gets paid for all this. Yet he has fewer than 500 Twitter followers. Whereas someone like Jimin -- a popular K-pop star -- has close to 400,000. I'm not faulting Jimin -- I'm sure he works hard at what he does. But is it really fair to say that he's 1000 times more successful than the academic I described? 

Twitter followers would be a method of quantifying success, I suppose, but I am skeptical that success can be quantified. And since Twitter is a notorious time-waster, not being on it at all might help with a person's success.

Material wealth seems to be what people here think of when they hear the word "success." I hope on reflection people can think of other ways to be successful.

As for physical strength, this strikes me as a mark of success only if one aims for it. There are plenty of people who are great at what they do who are not particularly strong in this way. Was Einstein physically strong? If not, was he a failure?

Beauty in women is largely good luck, and I can think of any number of successful women who didn't care about it. For example Iris Murdoch was a wonderful novelist and philosopher, but never cared at all about her appearance, cut her own hair, and dressed like a homeless woman. She also had lots of lovers, so apparently there are people out there who don't judge attractiveness simply by appearance. 

The acquisition of skills and having friends do seem more like attributes of success to me.

Maybe the qualities you list are things that appeal to you -- that you would find attractive -- but I'm not sure yet that they are all reasonable measures of success.

I have lived in a world where you were valued for your physical abilities (as a man) and women were valued more by virtue of being physically beautiful. I have also lived in a world where you are judged by your bank account. It is fair to say that my own values are different from others, but what else is there? Those qualities and criteria I mentioned are easy to measure.

I mentioned accumulated skills. Can you measure skill? Yes. Absolutely. You can measure someone's social skills by how liked he is by his community. You can measure someone's billiard skills by how often he wins matches and how quickly he wins matches. You can measure his video-making skills by how many likes he gets in YouTube. The list is endless. And we have to rely on things that are measurable, otherwise we end up with subjective criteria that are defined by varying opinions. We must find ways to quantify success, and the list I gave are very good options.

An athlete who can squat 500 pounds is a testament to so many things about him. It shows things like discipline and work ethic. It also shows the difficult-to-accept truth that people were not created equal. Either way, it's measurable.

I don't look for deeper dimensions because then we end up talking about woowoo stuff like "strength of spirit" and "witchpower."