I don't know for sure if this counts as flat out disagreeing with you, but I would venture so far as to say that 'success' has nothing to do with material things.  But then I have to consider different perspectives.  Success in whose eyes?  Success in the eyes of society?  Success in the eyes of God?  Successful by our own standards?  In the eyes of our peers?  Our Family?  I don't think they're all the same, all the time. 

It sounds like the success you're defining is in your eyes.  You're taking a step back and telling yourself, "Brad, you have all the things you want, your business is going well, you have a beautiful wife and healthy children, you must be successful"... That or you're lucky, or 'blessed', or you've worked hard and been lucky... and blessed. 

This is a work in progress, and I'm kinda thinking as I write... When I look over the list up there, I have to speculate that your family, your peers, & society all view you as successful as well, so perhaps they coincide more often than I think.  I don't know what your religious views are, and I have no desire to troll up your thread with religious banter, but I wonder what God's view of success is.  I mean, Ghandi and Mother Theresa were both very successful people, but they didn't have material things... the ability to buy whatever they wanted was never really a factor in their everyday lives, as far as I can tell.  I think their view of success was more associated with 'denial of the self', and learning to live without the material things that society tells us we need to have in order to be successful.  (of course, that was only a small part of what made them successful IMO)

I think success and happiness are intrinsically linked, and I think happiness is the more important of the two.  I believe wholeheartedly that one can be happy without being 'successful' by society's standards.  When I hear about a woman who adopts 3 children with AIDS, and then gets stricken with cancer herself, I don't view her as unsuccessful if she can't afford to go to the movies.

Please don't think that I'm being judgmental of you, because that's not my intention at all... I'm certainly no philanthropist.  I'm as selfish and self-centered as they come, but what sucks about my situation is that I'm surrounded by material things that are supposed to make me happy (some of which are paid for, and some aren't), but they don't.  I have a hole in my heart that can only be filled spiritually, but I'm apparently not 'broken' enough to allow it to be filled. 

The day is coming when I'll be able to 'give back' to a world that has been so good to me.  (I wrote about it in a recent article)...  When I'm 'giving back' in some capacity, then I'll consider myself 'successful'...  

We can all definine success on a personal basis. 

But when a stranger says "That man (or woman) is very successful" do you think that they are saying that that person has reached their "spiritual center"?

Many terms, such as success, do not have an ultimate definition because they are subjective. As a result, we have to rely on consensus.  And that consensus is likely to be different from culture to culture.  In the United States, I am pretty confident that the definition of success I've provided is pretty in-line with how the vast vast vast majority of Americans define it.

Most Americans aspire to achieve happiness and contentment by a combination of having a satisfying home and professional in which their professional life generates enough income for them to obtain the material possessions they desire.  This is one of the reasons why Americans work so hard and long.  Now, you may not agree that this is what people shoudl be doing but that's completely irrelevant. We can argue about how things should be all day. This is a question of how things are.