Ian - you have a wife and children, right? Well, if you've kept them housed, fed, clothed and loved all these years by working at something that you enjoy and believe has intrinsic value, then you've already done better than most. And if your work has done no harm and instead added something good and lovely to the world, and has led to you garnering the respect of those whom you respect, then you're already successful. And if though the challenges and disappointments of trying to build a career via good and valuable and life sustaining work you've also managed to grow in personal wisdom and patience and humility, then I think you've already won/earned the lottery, and have made of this veil of tears and mortal coil the best that can be made of it. Let the critics keep being critics, happy only when they are tearing down one accomplishment here or self-promoting another one there; and let the developers keep on developing, marking their progress based on the profitability of the deal, and on their next million; and let golfers be golfers, keeping score in whatever way suits them best, be that strokes taken or laughs shared; and let the specialists keep on nit-picking, claiming that this site was worse than that one, or that this routing didn't utilize that feature well enough. Happily accept that everyone has their own hierarchy of values, but just try to make sure that you honour your own personal/inner hierarchy of values, and that you judge yourself -- if you must judge -- by those standards and by none other. I have a feeling that one sure way to have a sense of success elude us is by embracing values second hand, as it were, from the world or from other people; and the second sure way to miss success is to have a moveable feast of personal values, one that changes with the seasons. It's interesting: the beauty of golf is that we compete against no one but ourselves, i.e. that, as Tom Paul was fond of pointing out, it's the rare game where opponents don't vie for the ball. And the beauty of golf course architecture is that the craftsman's work begins in/with the earth and with Nature, and that in the end Nature will inevitably claim back for itself that work, in whole or in part. In other words, it's the perfect game and the perfect profession for engendering personal value systems and for informing a healthy understanding of our ultimate place in the world. (Dust that golf course was, and to Dust it shall return.) The old Scots, remember, believed that golf courses were meant to be created (and the game meant to be played) on land that was of little value for anything else, i.e. on sandy, scrubby shores whipped by wind on which they could grow no food nor find any shelter. Those old Scots, I'd say, kept the game and the profession and themselves in a proper perspective for a long, long time. Best I think not to let a few decades in the reign of the signature-architect or in the era of the massive housing developments or half-million dollar initiation fees throw that perspective out of whack.
Peter
P.S. of course, all of the above reflects my own hierarchy of values, and I don't mean to impose/project them onto you.