Eva Bradley: Success on my own terms

I've always been a huge devotee of success. Aiming high and achieving even higher have been tenets that have driven me ever since I first decided it might be fun to build a sand city instead of just a sandcastle.
Throughout my teens, a determination to succeed saw me labelled a bit of a girly swat and the concept of near enough being good enough never entered my head.
Such was my commitment to the cause that at age 15 in the lead-up to my first big round of national exams, my own mother, bless her, suggested I lay off the studying because the world wouldn't end if I didn't get straight As. Which was a ridiculous notion because of course my world would surely have been over had such a disaster ever occurred.
Another 15 years on and the net result is two-fold. In relative terms, my grit and determination has seen me achieve a modicum of success in that I run a strong little business, take occasional overseas trips and live in a good street with nice neighbours.
The dark side of the moon, however, is that after spending my formative years putting myself under unnecessary stress to perform, I am now, quite frankly, over it.
I'm near enough, and from where I'm standing it feels pretty damned good.
This discovery came as somewhat of an epiphany earlier this week when I found myself in a small clutch of smarty-pants at a gathering aimed at generating ideas and collective thinking on propelling the region and ourselves further than we might otherwise have aimed for.
The keynote speaker, Xero accounting software founder and general darling of the national business community, Rod Drury, put it to us that the ease with which we attain success and happiness in New Zealand and the lack of emphasis we put on the former over the latter is in fact our biggest obstacle to true global supremacy.
When all of us can enjoy long weekends at the beach and most of us could, with a minimal amount of grunt work, aspire to throwing a jet ski into the package if we wanted, where is the motivation to push our businesses or indeed ourselves onto the world stage?
Life is good. Why try harder?
As the murmurs of agreement and general tut-tuts at our Kiwi idle ricocheted around the room like a Mexican wave, I couldn't help but disagree.
True, I hadn't bolted to the lofty heights of the Rich List overnight nor was I being touted as the country's greatest export product.
But what I was ... was happy.
And I knew for certain there were an awful lot of extremely rich and "successful" exporters out there who came nowhere close to fitting that category.
Absolute success in conventional terms ultimately does not belong to people like myself who, in the winter months (when the brutal regime of photographing weddings abates), find themselves sleeping in till 10am on weekdays and enjoying two-hour lunches with friends in favour of world domination.
It doesn't belong to girls who find themselves in bed with the electric blanket on three at 6pm, reading junk-food chick-lit instead of self-help business books designed to make you a millionaire by yesterday.
But it was once said by self-made success story Aristotle Onassis that the secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
If that is true, then after years of driving myself to the brink of exhaustion in the pursuit of conventional success, I now know that what really counts is knowing when you've arrived by your own definition and then pausing long enough to enjoy it.
Some might say it's not an especially smart conclusion, but it is a wise one, and it sure isn't something I'd ever have learnt while swatting for exams and that elusive A+.
 Eva Bradley is an award-winning columnist.