Dear LPG,

I think that I can confidently say that ultimately, we all want to be successful, but success looks quite different to different people.  Some people dream of being rich while others strive to be famous and the internet would have us believe that, if we have not arrived yet and are of an age group that LPG are aiming to reach with these pages, we may as well give up because we have missed the boat.

Perhaps the goal is to be famous when being famous is another way of saying that you want to leave your mark on this world before you leave it in the literal sense but, if you haven’t got started by the time you retire is it too late? 

I asked google to offer me a few lists of people who ‘made it’ later in life, and the disappointing thing is that they nearly all seem to rate old as being in your fifties which leaves me wondering what I can do to make a dent in this particular bubble armed with a life that has moved two decades on from that. 

I suppose we all have a life story which, by definition of the amount of years it has been in the making, has to have some high points and there will be many who look back on life and deduce that, had they risked not ending up in the job that they spent nearly forty years working at, they could have branched out, risked it all and followed their hearts when they first left school, but I think that we are all famous to some extent. 

For the young today it all seems to be about how many followers one has on Facebook or twitter, but the whole being in the right place at the right time has to be part of the equation too. 

But success is a state of being that means many things to many people and many of our successes in life are measured as such by the people around us rather than ourselves, so I have decided that writing an account of what you have done with your life so far might be the way forward because, as you go through the details of your life in that way, you are more likely to remember the little successes that you have had along the way; the ones that have a habit of merging into your history without trace if you are not careful.

Finally, I feel it worth saying that just in case you are still not convinced, we should remember that different types of success can appear at any time.  Captain Sir Tom has proved that it is never too late to become really successful, and indeed famous, but perhaps for most of us, success is a mathematical phenomenon and all the little successes we have enjoyed over the years add up to the successful person that we have become. 

RG, New Cross

RG shares some information that got her thinking …

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