A few weeks ago, I was driving by the elementary school my kids attended when they were younger.  As I sat at the traffic light near the school, I noticed the message on their sign: “Every Child Succeeds.”

Honestly, at first the message had zero impact on me.  Schools and churches and sometimes businesses put so many of these messages out there that I tend to find them easily ignored noise.  But as I sat at the traffic light, this message registered.  It lingered. Eventually it annoyed.

The message annoyed me because it’s a lie.  I’m sure whoever arranged the plastic letters had good intentions.  They likely wanted to encourage each student and parent to know that the teachers were committed to every child’s success.  Maybe they also wanted to remind teachers of this commitment.  But the message annoyed me because it is not true and sets up a harmful false expectation.

In school and in life, not everyone succeeds.  Depending on how you measure success, it’s fair to say that a decent percentage of the population downright fails in many aspects of life.  Kids drop out of school.  Marriages end.  People get fired from their job.  Some people commit crimes and go to prison.  If we define success as something that everyone achieves no matter what, then we’ve removed the possibility of any real achievement or accomplishment. 

Instead of proclaiming, “Everyone succeeds!” we will do better to notice who really succeeds and then help promote the factors that lead to their success.

So who does succeed?  Success is limited to those who 1) have a vision for success, 2) know the path to success, and 3) walk the path.  Let’s unpack those a bit.

Vision.  Stephen Covey famously declared that one of the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People is to “begin with the end in mind.”  Successful people don’t accidentally move through life, they move intentionally based on their vision of success.  The “end” they have in mind is not the day of their death, but their “telos” – their ultimate aim or purpose.  Successful people know what kind of life they want to live and what kind of person they want to be.  Without a vision, people perish (Prov. 29:18).

Path.  Not everything works.  Some paths lead to success while others lead to ruin.  To experience success, we not only need to know where we are headed, but we need to know how to get there.  What habits, actions, attitudes, and character traits combine to bring forth a bloom of goodness?  As the ancients of old and the wise of today know, virtue produces good fruit while vice retards growth and promotes decay.  One way to know the path is by personal trial and error, but a wiser method is to pay attention to the abundant examples of those who’ve lived well and experienced success.  While we cannot duplicate another person’s life in every regard, learning from others is perhaps a pivotal aspect of everyone’s path to success.

Walk.  One of my favorite thinkers right now is Dr. Jordan Peterson, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto.  In his forthcoming book, he offers 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.  His advice is both wise and practical (perhaps wise because it’s so practical).  He reminds us that success comes through practice – the real-world actions that we take in the everyday, ordinary walk of life.  Success comes to those who wake up each day aware of what is required to live well and then act accordingly.  It’s not enough to know what you should do; you have to do it.

For most of us, walking is the truly hard part.  Each day it seems that a new dragon of chaos is breathing distraction and destruction upon our path.  And so, we must summon the courage to face such dragons and to battle our way along the path, with a deep-hearted commitment to our vision.

Only those who walk rightly experience success.  Fortunately, perfection is not required.  Few missteps are fatal and learning to recover from mistakes is one of the lessons that wisdom offers to us as a resource.  We don’t have to be perfect, but we do have to be consistent.

I find a deep beauty in the truth that how we live matters.  While no person can completely control his or her destiny, each of us does have the dignity of what is called agency – the capacity to act, to choose, to influence.  You and I are not drifting on the winds of fortune or swirling down the drain of fatalism.  God has placed each of us in the midst of creation, has revealed to us the truth of how to live well, and has endowed us with the ability to choose this day how to live.

Every student does not succeed in school and not every person succeeds in life.  But each of has the opportunity to succeed. Those who know what success is, know what success takes, and are willing to do what it takes will prosper.  This is true for elementary school students, and it’s also true for parents, spouses, workers, friends, leaders and followers and the rest of the 8 billion people on the planet.  Most importantly, it’s true for you.

So let me ask you:

• What is your vision of success in life and as a person?
• What path will get you there?
• How consistent are you in walking that path?
• What’s one small change you could make today that would make success more likely?