Although independent bookstores were dying out like delicate flowers overrun by big weedy chain stores, he believed he'd found just the right location and specialty—a niche where he could survive and prosper. He created a beautiful little shop, which was both a temporary haven for the weary and a treasure trove of good books. But in spite of his planning and hard work, he couldn't make his business viable financially. After a long struggle, he finally had to let it go.

When I asked him how he was dealing with the store's failure, he said, "I'm not sure it was a failure exactly." I braced myself for some kind of positive-thinking screed, but he surprised me.

"If you're talking about my own hopes," he said, "it was definitely not successful. But maybe my personal financial success wasn't what it was for. Maybe the entire thing happened for reasons I don't know about—to help one guy, someone who walked into the store one day six months after it opened and spent half an hour there. Maybe it helped that one person, and maybe that's what it was for."

My friend's response was nothing short of amazing in the face of very difficult circumstances. This enterprise hadn't been a lark. He had sunk his savings into that store and lost all of it. Now he was working two jobs and fighting hard to keep his finances together. But his reaction was not a rationale designed to save face. I knew him well enough to see that he really meant what he said.

I remember a time when I too measured success differently—mostly back when I used to do a lot of drugs. (Wasn't acid great?) Once I saw how, if I touched one person with love, that love moved on when that person touched another, and again when that person touched someone else, and so on, until the love had traveled all around the world and touched everyone everywhere. I'm not the only one who believed this.

A lot of people I knew back then felt that, whatever you did, if you did it with a pure heart, it would have a good effect in the world, and we believed that this was the most important measure of success.

But I'm not a hippie anymore. I've become a sensible, mature adult. I gauge success and failure the "real" way, using that most grown-up measure: the bottom line. I deem something a success or a failure based on how much money it brings in. As I watch my friends and colleagues getting older, I see them making the same unspoken assessment. Even those of us who have managed to pursue work we care about are not viewed as successful unless we've figured out a way to make it pay. A video producer I know says, "You're supposed to make money, and if you don't, it's like there's something wrong with you. We talk as if other things were more important, but we don't really believe they are."

Given this intense pressure to evaluate ourselves solely in financial terms, maintaining another measure of worth can be a radical political act, requiring a great deal of effort and energy. The quest for "right livelihood" often comes down to a choice between doing what's right versus actually having a livelihood. Reconciling the two isn't easy; but maybe, when we tally up how we're doing, we overlook a more radical demarcation of success. Maybe when the work we've done has failed on the financial level, it has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams on a level that is, actually, beyond our wildest dreams. Maybe on that level we are all constantly succeeding and failing in ways in which we are completely unaware.

I'm not saying there's some cosmic book of judgment wherein we're all being evaluated. I'm talking about simply acknowledging that we don't know everything. We don't know what our kids are thinking, we don't know if recycling really makes a difference, and we don't know whether, perhaps, in the quietest moment, when we did the smallest good thing, we didn't effect a change of tremendous importance.

I know an artist who writes and illustrates children's books. At a point when her career was in a slow phase, a small dance troupe in Minneapolis asked her if they could turn one of her books into a performance. They couldn't afford to pay. She gave them permission, but admitted to me that it felt like another reminder of her failure to make the big-time.

She was on her way to the airport to attend the opening of this show when her purse was stolen. She hurriedly borrowed the money for another ticket and managed to make the plane. By the time she got to the theater she was frazzled and anxious. The whole thing felt difficult and fraught with disappointment. Waiting for the show to start, she thought, "Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe it's never going to work out the way I want it to. Maybe I really am a failure."

Then the lights went down and she watched as her book came alive. The production was brilliant. At the end of the performance, the audience joined with the troupe on stage and everyone danced together. She saw real live human beings enter the world she had created. She saw them being transformed within it. "I don't care what it cost," she told me. "I would have paid anything for that experience."

Beyond money, the artist's talent and vision had purchased this event—a visible example of the shining, delicate web of influence that connects us all. Listening to her story, I remembered the vision I'd had, all those years ago, of a network of infinite effect. I thought about my friend's bookstore, and how maybe one day someone had indeed wandered in, feeling low and discouraged. Maybe, while thumbing through a book, that person came upon a paragraph that spoke directly to him. And maybe he took a deep breath and suddenly felt the precious, unspeakable thing that was his life—that moment, that beat of his heart, unqualified, and awake. The web flows in unseen threads that ripple through the ether. If you create the best bookstore you can, or write the best book you can, or spend one hour with a child and really listen to what she has to say, its strands will vibrate with your influence. Maybe you'll get to see the results, like the artist did as the dancing surrounded her, but probably you won't. In either case, standard accounting practices don't apply. Your legacy is beyond appraisal. All you can know is that you have touched someone who then will touch another. In a way that can only be imagined, the check is in the mail.