Success

Caveat:  This post is mostly for me.

So I've been thinking about what it means to be successful.  For example, what makes a parent successful?  How is it measured?  Is it measured by how smart their children are?  How impressive their children are?  How much they love you?  How cute they are?  How much they hold to the values you have taught them?  All of these are things I am tempted to use to measure my own success as a parent.

Another example, what makes a missionary successful?  Is it how many people they baptize?  Is it how well-loved they are?  Is it how often people are moved to tears or action when they teach?  I think it's not uncommon for missionaries to measure their success by these things.

What makes a person successful?  Again, is it how smart, impressive, powerful, wealthy, beautiful, athletic or talented they are?  I think on paper (or computer screen) it's easy to say no, of course not.  But I think it's not uncommon to feel pressure to be these things in order to be successful.

So I think all of these are good and worthwhile goals.  I think they frequently are correlated with a successful parent, missionary, or person.  But I don't think they always do.

Preach My Gospel says this:

Your success as a missionary is measured primarily by your commitment to find, teach,

baptize, and confirm people and to help them become faithful members of the Church

who enjoy the presence of the Holy Ghost.

Avoid comparing yourself to other missionaries and measuring the outward results of

your efforts against theirs....Your responsibility is to teach clearly and powerfully so they can make a

correct choice. Some may not accept your message even when they have received a spiritual

witness that it is true. You will be saddened because you love them and desire their

salvation. You should not, however, become discouraged; discouragement will weaken

your faith. If you lower your expectations, your effectiveness will decrease, your desire

will weaken, and you will have greater difficulty following the Spirit.

You can know you have been a successful missionary when you:

• Feel the Spirit testify to people through you.

• Love people and desire their salvation.

• Obey with exactness.

• Live so that you can receive and know how to follow the Spirit, who will show you

where to go, what to do, and what to say.

• Develop Christlike attributes.

• Work effectively every day, do your very best to bring souls to Christ, and seek

earnestly to learn and improve.

• Help build up the Church (the ward) wherever you are assigned to work.

• Warn people of the consequences of sin. Invite them to make and keep commitments.

• Teach and serve other missionaries.

• Go about doing good and serving people at every opportunity, whether or not they

accept your message.

When you have done your very best, you may still experience disappointments, but

you will not be disappointed in yourself. You can feel certain that the Lord is pleased

when you feel the Spirit working through you.

Ok, that's long, and I did the bold-ing.  But I really like it.  I like it because everything it talks about is something within your personal control rather than outward results, which is sometimes out of your control.  Also, I think a lot of them transfer to being a successful parent and person.  It's so easy to measure our success by outward results.  A simple example is when the house is clean and dinner is good, I feel like I'm a good wife and mom.  But those really are not my highest priorities as a wife and mom.  I want to do them, but I think there are more important things, like teaching and loving and serving my family.  But a clean house and good food is easy to see and measure.  And perhaps more significantly, it's easy for other people to see and measure.

Anyway, I just hope that I can be more concerned with being successful as a person, a wife and mom, a member of the church, and child of God by doing the sort of things this list talks about.  I really think that's how Heavenly Father measures our success.