You may not start life this way. However, "success" is not about well agreed upon goals optimized by community study and discussion. Rather, it is about sales, and to a great extent it is about those wanting to succeed choosing measures that defines success for what they have achieved already, or can with confidence expect to achieve. It is a con. It is a self-delusion. It's a lie.
Why? Well because the need for a measure to succeed in a dominance behavior situation will not be agreed upon by those doomed to fail. It will certainly not be agreed upon by those who will be abused by the results of the behavior needed to suceed. Indeed the whole blather about "free market" is there to justify such definitions in place of more egalitarian policy which would need to be generated by fair and well informed community discussion that in turn would truncate accumulations by those who have acted abusively or otherwise stupidly to get those piles they got. Being on top of a pile is NOT the justification for the pile. Having gotten there first is not a justification for the pile or the possession of the pile any more than thievery would be. If possession is 9/10ths of the law, then not only is an arbitrary rule, but clearly it only applies to those presently in possession of the item in question, as somewhere down the line of that present possessor, if not at that possessor, is a point where that possession was taken from another possessor. So, how do you go back? How do you fix that? Clearly you have to instead decide on equal distribution. All other rules are temporally arbitrary.
So, then success must be achieving something practically near equal treatment, equal stewardship, equal access to consumer goods, and equal justice under the law. Everything else is abusive injustice, and not saying so is just prevarication with maintenance of that injustice as a goal.
However, the problem is that you choose your own personal definition of success. To know that math around it, you need to spend time to learn that math. To get beyond arbitrary predation and destructive competition for things, to a point where such reason based arithmetic rules our equilibrium, we need to learn math, to observe counts, and to observe needs. Despite the implied definition of conservatism, all too often the de facto definition of it is to deny, or at least ignore such needs, such actions, as lead to this conclusion. It is not a matter of reason. It is a matter of getting away with abusive thievery.