Success is measured in many different ways, as it means different things to different people. But this doesn’t mean that having one form means having the other. To capture a few forms, I made this Venn diagram below.

There are three: money, power, and influence. Let’s take a look at the first circle: money. A lottery winner has money, but this person probably has no power politically or socially. Money helps a person get these things, but it’s not a certainty. The second is power, the ability to directly drive someone’s behavior. A good example is someone at the FDA, who can literally make or break a company’s future by approving a new drug. However, this may lead to a modest life in the background, with no money or influence. The third is influence, someone like Malcolm Gladwell or Tim Ferriss. Those two are not particularly wealthy as compared to hedge fund managers, but they have large followings and have avid readerships.

Some people certainly are at the intersection of all three, such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk.  Different people are motivated by different things, as seen by the modest lives of some multi-millionaires and the extravagant lives of others. It’s up to each person to figure out what matters to them in the end.