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

[Belacqua]

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."

You have an interesting approach to things. It's something I hadn't thought about before.

It hadn't occurred to me that to be meaningful success would have to be quantifiable. 

Leftists, Buddhists, and other alternative value types sometimes criticize modern society as being too dependent on quantifiability. Obviously science demands it, and perhaps this is why it gets applied to other, non-science parts of life. But this often ends up with dollar-value being the only way we can talk about a thing's worth, since sentimental or emotional or ethical value doesn't have a number figure. Scientism and capitalism go hand in hand. 

I don't know what "witchpower" is and would be skeptical of it. "Strength of spirit" makes sense to me, though. We all have tough times in life, and it is good if we can get through them without crumbling too badly. To me, a strong spirit is one who knows how to endure hardship. (Which would include knowing how to ask for help -- not solely cowboy individualism.) 

The reason I brought up Walden earlier is because it represents a famous American alternative to the usual values of wealth and fame. It's the most famous, but there are a lot of books which see success as the ability to live happily without the usual societal markers. There used to be a strong alternative tradition in the US, consisting of Thoreau fans, hippies, certain kinds of Protestant ascetics, etc. Their goal was never to renounce success or pleasure but to define it differently from the mainstream bourgeoisie. It occurs to me now that this tradition may be largely forgotten now, as capitalism takes over more and more of life. When I was in college, though, there were both Christian influences on the shallowness of "worldly goods," and hippy/Buddhist values on a simple life of heightened awareness. When Gary Snyder came to speak at my college they had to move his speech to the main movie theatre because so many people wanted to hear it. 

In China and Japan, too, there is a long long tradition of "recluse literature." These vary in their seriousness, but it's probably fair to say that they all grow out of Buddhist thought on what's important. Generally they talk about how success is a matter of leaving the rat race and learning to live happily with less. Open-eyed awareness of how your garden changes through the seasons, and appreciation of its beauty, is something to be valued more than money. That kind of thing.