Success and Significance

This picture must look vaguely familiar to many. Any parent who has been involved in Junior Varsity Football with a son on the field or a daughter on the sidelines will know what it is like to get the children ready, clean the uniforms and do all the extra driving to make sure they are “there on time”. Well my buddy Jim Covell told me one day that there were two phases in a man’s life. In the first we strive for success, but in the second it is for significance. This poem, though brief, is about the transformation.

Success and Significance

By any measure
Accomplishing your goals is called success.
Yet in and of itself
When all is said and done it means little.

Success is not the measure of the man,
But what comes after it -
After the struggling and the inward perspective
Comes significance,

That greater purpose
For which we all should strive,
To matter, not to ourselves
But to the lives of others,

“Hello”, he said
Eyeing me in the football stand,
And with diminished accolade
Expounded, “Your Roddy’s dad.”

And in a twinkling
The true measure came to me,
That in his world, and that of my son
I had attained significance.