If you would like to have the Quest-4 team give a presentation or host a group discussion on the topic of success, send an e-mail to pathfinder@quest-4.com and we'll do our best to arrange it as we pass through your city.

Discussion in Columbus

While in Columbus, Ohio, the Quest-4 team had the opportunity to lead a group discussion at Susan Moran's house on the elements of success and personal fulfillment. The group, moderated by the Quest-4 team, had an animated discussion that ran well into the night with friends new and old sharing ideas on success, finding one's right path in life, and the trials and tribulations of living in "Generation X".

The Group

In attendance that evening were:

Moishe Appelbaum (25) Student, computer consultant, camera sales
Sarah Arnold Behrens (35) Medical student, actress
Robert Behren (36) Instructor, actor, director, choreographer
Kae Denino (27) professor
Steve Kaczmarek (30) Instructor, consultant
Mathew Moran (27) Attorney
Keith R. Newton (25) Music instructor, musician

Discussion Excerpts

Here are just a few of the insights from the evening of discussion:

Success Is

"I've heard people today say success is how much free time you have. It's not what you do, or how much money you have, or what car you drive, it's whether or not you have time for your wife, your children, your husband whatever. That becomes the barometer. "

"If you didn't have a certain amount of material success you wouldn't feel successful, you'd feel like crap. It wouldn't be, I have no shoes, I have no socks, it's 20 degrees, the winds blowing through my pants, but I feel good about what I do. You won't necessarily feel that way if you don't get your basic needs met. But as long as you get your basic needs met, and you're happy with that, and you're looking for something that's going to fulfill you intrinsically, you are on the road to success."

"For me I define success as freedom. It's having the time to do what you want to do. You have to have time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. If you're just out there to sow the fields and that's all you do, you never get to see fruits, then why bother."

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"I found it very difficult when I got to college to choose what I wanted to study. I saw relationships between this and this, and it seemed like if you focus in on one thing you would miss the big picture. "

"I'm in that position right now."

"Are you?"

"I'm in my third year and I don't have a major yet."

"And every body has told you that it's bad. Take your time. The focus of education is really just in a bubble, you finish your degree and it's not really work oriented at all so you really don't know what you're studying. Unless you as a student are motivated and go into the work place to see how your major will apply to the industry, whatever. You have not idea what you're studying and you just hope that your degree will apply to something. It's backwards, it used to be you had a mentor who would be practicing the industry and you would watch and learn. The world doesn't work in such segmented ways. You don't study one thing and stay in it. On a job for 3 and a half years , I saw people were fired, downsized, shifted around, back and forth. "

"We have so many opportunities in America. More often that not we do get our needs met, so then you do have to decide where and how you want to go. I think the broader you go the more you are enriched as far as success is concerned, at least in my experience. I need to have the broad experience, and I needed to decide that. However, that may no be acceptable if you measure success with money. I won't have the time to put in 15 hours a day to become a nurse, for example. For me it's more important to have the time to be broad in what I want to do. So for me that's success."

"Right now I'm in the position in my life where I'm as confused as hell. I'm trying to figure out what is it that I want to do. I took something because I wanted to have a certain quality of life and use it to get to where I wanted to go. And I'm doing that now and I'm finding that with the challenges and everything with my job, I'm going completely nuts. I'm trying to do my job and what I want to do, rather than just what I want to do. I guess if I was more of a risk taker I'd go out and live real poor and just do what I want to do until I decide I can't do that any more. "

"By the time I'm 25 I want to know what I want to do. I don't want to be 30 or 31 and not know."

"I'm 35 and I'm still confused. [Laughs]"

"I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I thought I knew for sure, dammit this is what I want to do. But now I'm going completely nuts out of my mind. I know I'm doing this, but I know I also want to try that but I can't do that because I'm doing this ... If I'd just taken the risk then I think I'd know a lot more clearly now what I want to do versus trying to do everything just so I have a cushion. I'd say find what you think you want to do and just take the risk. "

"You have to look inward you have to decide what it is you want to do with your life. I think one of the worst things we do in this country is we point a gun at your head at 17 or 18 years old and say decide what it is you're going to do for the rest of your life. And I don't know if at 17 or 18 or 30 you necessarily know. Life is evolution, we're constantly learning new things about ourselves and you may change. The wonderful thing about Gen-x out of all past generations is that we're the one group that probably has the most opportunity to change. We can reinvent ourselves at any turn in the path that we want to. "

"I think if you're going to be successful then rather than asking yourself what profession do I want to be and what do I do to put food and bread on the table, ask yourself what would you do if you really had the opportunity to do whatever the hell you wanted to do. What is it that makes you happy. If you could find a profession or something that matches that and a lifestyle that goes with it then you are probably going to be successful. Otherwise you're probably going to be unbalanced and unhappy throughout most of your life, no matter how much money or material stuff you acquire."

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"I think everybody watched growing up, and saw all the cars and everything and thought "This is pretty good. Look at all these folks, they're pretty young, I can have all that. I want to figure out something I can do to make money really fast and then go and then I can go do something else." So you either make your money real fast then go off and do something else until you run out of money. Or you get into this mode where you make the money, and then just as you're starting to make the money you begin to plan to go off and do what you really want to. But then you think: "wait a minute, but if I do this much more I can go and do this." So you become one of those workaholics. So you become either completely crazy or you say screw it, I'm not doing anything at all. "

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"I think you have to be somewhat realistic. I think one problem with our generation is everyone wants to have the career, kids, perfect marriage, some time for themselves. You have to be realistic. Maybe you have to work for five years, ten years, not have kids, earn some money, get the right position, and then you can have kids. You can't have everything at once and I think our generation has problems with that. You have to sacrifice. "

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"You have to watch with comparisons. For example, I could be a successful attorney but not in a million years would I be a billionaire like the guys who founded Yahoo. I went to an Ivy League school and had a lot of friends who are engineers and are starting companies and just getting successful. And tomorrow someone could come in and offer them 25 million dollars for their company and then all of a sudden they're multi-millionaires. I could look at that and think "gee, am I going to be able to do that?" But wait a minute, I'm not an engineer, I don't have those skills. You can't create a company just like that. It's different. A lot of time you look at the entrepreneurs or investment bankers or whoever in our generation is making tons of money and try to compare yourself to them. But if you don't have that training or background it's kind of useless to compare yourselves to them. If you're going to compare yourself, compare yourself to people who are doctors or lawyers or whatever it is you are doing. If you have to compare yourself at least stay within something that is realistic. "

"Just on Oprah they had a show on new millionaires and had all these people who had ideas and became rich from them. But then they say that this was after many years of hard work and struggling. But you get the impression it was a quick easy road. And you think, "yeah, why didn't I think of that [invention or idea]." You think I could have had that idea. And you know what? You could. But then you figure out, is it the cash that's important to me? Is it the cash and knowing that I came up with something great? Or is it that I'm doing something that I know what I want to do, and the cash, and the fact that I'm doing something great. You get all these variables and you just get confused. "

"We measure things by material things because that is the easiest thing to do. And the funniest thing is most people I know who are happy don't get unhappy until they go to a party and meet somebody who starts telling them all the other things that they're doing. Up to that point they were satisfied and then they come home and say "Damn, that guy's doing..." So you gotta look inward , you can't look outside for that answer. You gotta know it. "

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"You have to decide what your goal in life is, and realize that the goal can change. Even if it is tomorrow. You have to decide what your goal in life is, see if it's realistic, and then decide what is the best way of achieving that goal. Be realistic in the sense that this is what I'm going to plan to do but I know it may not work out. "

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"If you get Depression Era folks or people who have survived war they always think save for a rainy day because you never know when things will be pulled out from under you. Our generation has never experienced that. It's really remarkable, Gen-X is the most fortunate generation in American history. We haven't had to face a major war, a lot of the major diseases have been wiped out and the ones that haven't, not all but some, we can avoid getting if we're careful. We have had information and education more that any other group of people. We can expect to live longer. Even if we're poor we're still wealthier than a quarter of the population of the earth. We haven't had to experience the kind of physical and societal turmoil of previous generations. "

"I think that's part of our problem, our generation has had everything given to us so that now when people are leaving school and they get one job offer they get all upset. How could I only get one offer? They were wanting three or four. If now you're not getting the newest and greatest, the best new game, the vacation to Florida every year, or whatever it is, you bitch and complain. Thank god we don't have a major war, our generation would not be able to handle it! [laughs] "

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"Many people would not make significant changes in their lives until they sense there is a real definite crisis. Most people when they're faced with that situation feel that they're either not prepared for it or for whatever reason don't want to accept it and try to avoid it. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, that's a survival instinct. That's what people do.

But I think people who look back on their lives and see more success than failure are the ones who anticipated the crisis and before it happened said what am I going to do. They're the ones that sit back and think " I got a choice". They can't have it all. You make 75-80,000 dollars a year at a job you don't really like or you can go and spend 35-40 of your most productive years doing something that you enjoy. Maybe you don't get the big house, maybe you don't get the big car, but maybe at the end of it all you're happy. Or you can sit back and say I can marry somebody that I respect as a human being, I love and I want to spend time with, or I'll marry the super model. You have your choices. And I think the people who are successful are the people who plan and make goals and have an idea. "

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"I think many people who have done things as well as they can aren't necessarily happy. I think the big myth in our culture is that you can have everything. You CAN'T have everything. You have to make choices and you have to be satisfied with what you got. You just have to thanks God that you're alive and you're walking around and breathing and eating and that's enough. For that moment that is success, congratulations. "

"It's difficult to be happy at times, and maybe that's just me being negative. I don't think everybody's happy all the time. And I think you can have everything and still not be happy. And sometimes that's okay. As long as you know happiness at times throughout your life it's okay. Every once in a while be dissatisfied, it makes you check on things, it makes you take stock in life. "

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"I think it's very important to forget what success is to people in movies and on television, and what successful means to your parents and whatever else you've been taught in school. You have to forget all that. You have to search your own mind and your own heart, in an intellectual and an emotional way to find what your version of success is. In some ways I feel I am successful. I'm where I want to be right now. In some senses you have to realize not to get too hard on yourself. Just existing, just being here, just making it through the day, just not taking the easy way out, that's an achievement. We are all successful to a large extent whether we feel it or not. "

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"Don't keep striving all the time, be happy with the success that you've already achieved. Don't keep looking. Looking for conflict or something else sometimes just opens you up to failure or more stress in your life, or perhaps you sacrifice your family or some other aspect of your life to achieve your job and you're all of a sudden not content with that. Now you want this job or that job and you then continue to sacrifice. And I think that's a problem that a lot have with achieving success is that they're never really satisfied. Be satisfied, no matter how much money you're earning, whatever, if you feel you're successful, be satisfied. Don't allow yourself or your family whoever it is, society, tell you you are not successful.

If you're not always trying to better yourselves or do something else you're not successful, I think that's a bunch of crap. I know I personally don't want to have conflict all my life, I don't want to keep thinking I have to do something better, do something different. The hell with that, I want to enjoy life. Be satisfied. If you've already achieved success in your job why keep struggling to do better because other people think you need to. "

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"Take it in small steps. Try not to get overwhelmed. For myself a lot of time there are so many options and so many things that I feel I should be doing that I get stuck just with the thought of all the things I need to be doing. Taking small steps, accomplishing just a little something every day. That can give you the confidence and motivation and small successes to get you going. "

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"You also have to stop measuring success in what you've done, like it's over. I blame this on TV, I know it's bad [laughs] .. because life wraps up in half an hour or an hour, the stories over and it's done, and everyone's happy. We're trained to say this process is done and once it's done I should never have to do it again and I should be happy. But that's not it, it's an ongoing continuous process. And we don't like that kind of maintenance. It will never be done until we die, and then you don't want it done. So we should enjoy the process more than the results."

"The process takes the weight off of the goal, for instance wanting to have it all figured out by the time you're 25. I had hoped for that [laughs] but it didn't work out that way. If you concentrate more on the process of it then you never necessarily have it all figured out and that's okay. "

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Quest-4's focus group in Omaha

Quest-4's presentation at the University of Wisconsin - Stout.

Quest-4's focus group in Sacramento.

© Copyright Chris Moeller & Brian Ardinger, 1998