Accomplishment is nice when you can get it, but the better measure of a successful human life is readiness to engage in struggle.
If the measure of success were the mere achievement of one's goals, it would be trivially easy to be a success simply by setting your expectations as low as possible. Achieving the goal of eating a bag of chips while watching MTV is not an inspiring moment in a human life well lived. As well, even if one is pursuing more challenging goals, some of these may involve challenge but have little intrinsic value. Once you succeeding in memorizing the value of pi to a hundred decimal places, what have you learned beyond the capacity of your memory, and what has the world gained from your feat? Finally, even if one aspires to lofty goals, like curing cancer, achieving these may involve an element of luck. It seems cruel that one's success as a human being might turn on circumstances beyond one's control.
The accomplishments that reveal something about your character and your values are those that are hard-fought. Unless you are willing to risk failure in the pursuit of your goals, these goals are, in a sense, not really yours. Rather, they are goals you will pursue if there is a reasonable likelihood of achieving them. If the chances of failure are great enough, you can live without them.
Values and goals that are central to your being, however, are valued regardless of whether there is a clear and easy path by which to achieve them. They are things you care about so deeply that you would fight for them even if your failure was assured, since to do otherwise would be to deny their value to you. In a way, our deepest values are parts of us that might transcend our death, so our efforts to reach them are our best chance at immortality.
