How do YOU measure success?

For anyone seeking or perhaps in some small measure hoping for commercial writing and publishing success, how do you envision it? How do you envision it affecting you, your life, and your writing?

For anyone who has found commercial writing and publishing success, has it matched your vision of what you expected and hoped for? How has it affected you, your life, and your writing?

Personally, I am somewhere in between. I seek yet I am afraid to find. This thing I do, which we all do, this identity -- writer -- which I have come to view as my calling, for try as I might (and I have!) to resist, to not write, to not be this, to devote myself to something else, why am I not better at it? Or am I already successful?

I'm reading Rick Rubin's book:

I do have something to lose: my love of creation. The spark in the gap. The moment when inspiration flows in, overwhelming, unmistakable, and glorious. And I am reminded of why I do this.

So how about you? Where are you on your path? What do you see before you? What lies behind you? What keeps you coming back to the page? The moment when it's you and the promise of what could be. Inspiration.