What About Success?

Two years ago, A.J. Brown finally won the Super Bowl. He had spent years in the league chasing it — the training, the losses, the offseasons — all of it pointed at the one thing everybody told him was the greatest thing a player could do. And then he won it. Afterward he wrote something honest on Instagram: "I've had time to reflect on being a champion. I tried to feel how everyone made it seem that a champion should feel, but unfortunately, it was short-lived. Two days, to be exact."

Two days. A lifetime of striving, and the satisfaction lasted a long weekend. Then the only question left was: when do I get to do it again?

This is not a problem with football. It is the oldest problem in the world, and the wisest, richest man who ever lived already ran the whole experiment for us. Solomon had the throne, the treasury, and zero restrictions. "Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them," he wrote. "I kept my heart from no pleasure." He could buy, build, and taste anything. And when he stepped back to survey the whole glittering pile, his verdict was brutal: "Behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun."

Striving after wind. You can run as hard as you want at it; your hands close on nothing. That is what acquisition-success feels like on the back end. You get the job and discover you want a different job. You get the relationship and find it isn't what you pictured. You get the ring, and forty-eight hours later the ache is back.

Here is the mercy hidden inside Solomon's gloom: God let the smartest, wealthiest man in history prove that the wind can't be caught — so that you wouldn't have to spend your one life proving it again. The emptiness you've felt at the top of the ladder isn't a sign you climbed wrong. It's a sign the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Before you define success this week, let Solomon and A.J. Brown save you some years. The trophy was never going to be enough. It was never built to be.