If you were to ask ten people on the street what they would consider a successful life, I can almost guarantee you would get ten completely different answers. According to Woody Allen, simply showing up accounts for 80 per cent of success. For others, the threshold may be slightly higher.
 
But if expecting ten people to agree is difficult, how about a whole generation?
 
And yet, that is exactly what was implied by Derek Handley, a young entrepreneur-cum-social-and-environmental-conscience-cum-astronaut-in-waiting, when interviewed on The Nation last weekend.
 
Handley argued that productivity and economic growth are flawed measures of a nation’s success, and that tailoring policies around this goal is not representative of what Gen-Y want success to be.
 
So how does this generation define success? Unfortunately, this isn’t clear. While Handley mentions social and environmental concerns, all he tells us is what success is not: the exclusive pursuit of economic growth.
 
Handley cites as evidence a shift in business attitudes of changing notions of success away from a simple profit motive.
 
He argues there are a growing number of CEOs and business leaders who recognise they are stakeholders in their community, and conduct their affairs with a social and environmental conscience.
 
But this misses the point that profits derived from economic growth have allowed businesses to expand their scope beyond their daily operations in the first place.
 
Economic growth gives individual branches of society the resources to contribute to the causes that resound with them most. After all, there are as many problems to solve, and ways of solving the problem, as there are definitions of success.
 
Businesses from all sectors can bring their comparative advantage of unique sector knowledge, business acumen, and access to resources to the table in addressing these issues.   
 
Without growth, there would be greater dependence on government to solve all these problems, with fewer resources, opportunities for collaboration, and appetite for risk. That is, if they recognise these problems at all.
 
Economic growth has also produced unprecedented opportunities to apply new science, technology and innovation to the same social and environmental problems that plagued generations before us. The greatest change for this generation is not one of unprecedented ethical concerns, but unprecedented means of addressing these concerns.
 
Every generation likes to believe it is on the brink of revolution. But concern for environmental and social issues is hardly new, nor is corporate responsibility and philanthropy.
 
Let’s not be the generation who believed it had such intellectual and moral prowess over its ancestors, it could overthrow the centuries-old wisdom that economic growth improves wellbeing and living standards for all.