You don't get to keep the baton

Everyone remembers the summit photo. Nobody frames the fourth failed attempt, the gear that broke at exactly the wrong altitude, the night you genuinely considered turning back and didn't. But that's where almost everything actually happened. The photo at the top lasts a few seconds. The struggle to get there is the part that shaped you.

I used to measure success by the summit. The yachts I’ve built, the sailing victories, and the moments everything finally went right after years of getting it wrong. I don't measure it that way anymore.

Here's the shift. It's not that outcomes don't matter, they do. It's that I stopped believing the outcome is what's actually valuable. What's valuable is everything underneath it, the failed attempts, the wrong decisions repeated until they finally taught you something, the nights giving up would have been the sensible choice and you kept going anyway. That's not the boring prelude to success. That's the actual substance of it. The summit is just the moment it becomes visible to other people.

Which changes what I think is worth passing on. Not the achievement itself, the win doesn't transfer, someone else can't use your finish line. What transfers is everything that got you there, the bruises, the scars, the specific ways you failed before you understood why. Those are useful to someone else in a way the trophy never is.

Here's the thing though, I don't think there's a right answer to what success actually means, and I'd be wary of anyone who tells you there is. For some people it genuinely is the summit, the number, the thing they can point to, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's not for me to judge someone else's definition against my own. This is just where I've landed, the older I get, not a verdict on where you should land too.

For me, success stopped being about what I keep, and became about what I can hand forward. Whatever you've built up over a life, money, knowledge, a skill, a scar you earned the hard way, none of it seems to matter much sitting still. It matters when someone else can use it.

Think of it like a relay race. You don't get to keep the baton. You run your leg as well as you can, and the entire point is passing it on, so someone else can keep running with it. Hold onto it instead, and the race just stops with you.

That's why I can't throw things away either, materials, skills, knowledge, if there's still use left inside them. Same instinct, just applied to what you make instead of what you know.

If something I've built or said or made ends up in someone else's hands, doing something useful there, even once, even for one person, I think that already counts. Not because it's the only way to count. Just the way I've come to count it.