Defining Success and a diatribe on social networking

While I haven''t thus far felt compelled to define success, I have stumbled upon a definition of success that resonates with my personal goals, and I'd like to share it with you.

From the FundsforWriters website:

Success means earning a living doing what you love

Earning a Living
I think that's a perfect expression of what my goals are with this whole writing thing. Earning a living; We're in a two-income culture, and I have almost 3 times as many children as the average American. While we do live a lot cheaper than other families, we still aren't exceeding 3 times the income level of anyone. So I don't expect to suddenly jump up the writing income ladder into three times the average income of a full-time writer, I do aim to perfect the craft and the business end of it, and eventually enjoy a nice income to contribute to our family's needs.

Doing What You Love
I love being a mom. I love the child-development aspect and the psychology of watching how each different personality type responds to the stimulus of growing up. I love watching them solve problems and follow their interests. I love watching them learn how to reach their goals. I love re-discovering the world with them, every day. And I love writing about it. More importantly, though, I love the idea of helping other women find bliss in their parenting. My challenge, sometimes is to not write about my own children so that readers might find joy in them, my challenge is to write about finding joy in children so that readers might find joy in their own. I do both, I guess. I hope.

Now that I have a workable definition of success, I will be focusing my attention to working on projects that further that purpose. PPP might not be part of that process. Hotel reviews might not be part of that process. However, those are the things that have brought me income lately, so I guess I will participate in those, but I will forget about the social networking business, it has been a bit of a neverending cycle. I end up with a bunch of readers who come to me just so that they can "network" but the network is based upon... networking. I guess if networking were my passion, I might like that. However, since the passion is parenting, I will focus instead on creating quality parenting material and learning about the needs of the parenting market, in print and online. I will also stick better to my working schedule and specifically name the times and days I plan to visit (more) parenting boards to be in touch with readers and build my blog traffic. I will do that in the morning, work and play with the kids in the daytime and actually write-write in the evenings, since that's how my brain works.

So what is your definition of success? Is success a journey or a destination? I believe it is a journey.