How do you define professional success?

[SweetDripp]

In your opinion, is professional success defined by accumulated wealth, position or title, notoriety, personal satisfaction, or something else?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Mostly making customers very satisfied with our product. I still believe very strongly in the old school mindset of focusing on customer loyalty despite changing business trends. Success to me comes from seeing repeat customers who are very happy with what we are doing, not how many sales we have.

I have always been rather absent the interest in position and wealth to a fault. It took me a very long time to even learn to negotiate for higher positions and salary since I didn't really care about it. It took a colleague telling me that they're exploiting me to realize I might need to start negotiating a bit. I'm grateful to that colleague since it helped me a lot financially which became especially important after I married, but it's still something I lack much interest in overall.

The other for me is innovation. I'm an R&D guy and coming up with successful innovative solutions is few and far between, but occasionally I stumble into gold of a kind that can change the industry (have a Silver Edge award from Siggraph for my contributions in computer graphics techniques as something I'm very proud about). Somewhere between 90-99% of my ideas fail miserably, but every now and then, I get really lucky and manage to come up with something deeply impacting to our industry. I live for those moments.

[BCA6010]

I'd consider "professional success" to be relative to the job and/or company, and mostly revolving around advancement rather than income even though the two would go hand in hand.

[IslaTheWitch]

Proficiency in my field and a few around. Work is looking for me. My github name is better known than my real name, and that feels really good :D

yes, money follows... but it's just a nice addition. What is most important is the real satisfaction. And this feeling, I do something real that changes other people's lives.

[Jessica405]

Getting as far up the ladder as you can. So many other things depend on that. Job satifaction, good salary for starters.

[NathanDavis]

a positive balance between all of these and more...

[Nice222]

I define professional success by how much time do you get off not working and by what you can afford to do with your time off.

[Bklynbadboy12]

I define it by wealth and status but it can also defined how many people you help

[slatyb]

Personal satisfaction. No one else gets a vote.

[shortster]

Keeping a job.