What Is Success Anyway?
posted in Success, Success Theory |I was rereading some previous blogs on success and it prompted me to reconsider what ‘success’ really means. To some, success is achieving your goals. To others, it’s being happy when you do.
So often we define success in terms of what society or someone else regards as success – a great job, good marriage, healthy secure family, financial security…….
But in my mind, these things are only success to you, if they are what you genuinely desire with all your heart. There are two aspects of achieving success:
- Defining your success goals
- Defining your path to reach those goals.
For instance, if one of your goals is to have $5million. You can take an honest path, a dishonest path, a manual laboring path or a strategic intellectual path. There are also costs associated with each path. Do you achieve this in 10 years at the cost of other goals such as relationship and health; or are you willing to take a little longer and build on other goals at the same time.
We each must make our own decisions. After a number of ‘life crashes’ – whilst in the eyes of most people I am extremely successful; I don’t share their view. Sure I may be hard on myself, but I couldn’t reconcile what I had to show for the effort I had put in. I made some very bad mistakes in trusting other people, and have paid a very heavy price, both in financial terms and my willingness to allow others control over my financial assets again.
So I have changed my path – instead of expecting to retire in 2 years – I have just taken two years off to pursue some personal passions. This has cost my business quite a lot in terms of loss of market momentum; hence it will now take me at least 5 years to achieve what I would have in those two years. But I decided to take some of my ‘retirement’ years in advance. I am not sure that I want to retire anyway – what is that really all about. As I am many years from the standard retirement age, it is hard for me to understand what I may feel at that age. So my goal is not to retire at any particular age – but it is to have the option to retire at any time after a particular age. These subleties in definition make all the difference to how we approach our goals. So what is your personal success definition?
Nicola