thinking about success

Last class we discussed a lot of things, but one of those that stuck in my mind was what we consider success to be. It's been brought up that success is money, that it comes from happiness, or that it's satisfying an audience. After a while of thinking about it, I think that success is if whatever you created serves the purpose that you intended for it. If you google success quotes, you get a lot of deep stuff like "don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally" and "the size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire". I believe that success is something that comes as a product of hard work, desire, determination, and purpose. And something is truly successful if it has all of those characteristics: if you get what you wanted out of what you put into it.So when we say that some video games are dumb because there's no purpose or because the game is just some mind-numbing source of entertainment but they're getting a lot of money, maybe the creators intended it to be just that. Maybe they made it just to target an age group and then make a ton of money off of them. If that's what they wanted and if they achieved it, then that's success. If an indie filmmaker makes a movie to express themselves and bring out something unexpected, but it doesn't make a lot of money, their success isn't based off of the cash it's whether or not they feel like they got their message across.
It's a big decision as incoming artists to decide our purpose with our work, and even more important for Christians. Do we make things for money? Do we make it for a message? Do we make work for ourselves? Or do we do it for God? And can we be successful in doing whatever route we choose? Just some things to think about. :)