What’s Your Personal Definition of Success?
How do you define success? Do you use job title and salary as your measurements of success? If not, what do you use to measure success? And usually, to many, success leads to happiness.
Growing up, I was routinely pushed to be the best. I was taught that I needed the highest grades so I could go to a good college so I would get a good job. And by “good job”, that meant being the President of the United States. Or if not The President, a president of a company with all the perks and the high salary. Wow, not a high bar to achieve or anything?! And it wasn’t just my family that reminded me of this, but each environment I was in along the way kept sending this message. Achievements were the measurement of success. If I just keep working harder, then I will excel at the current step which helps me get to the next step. And so on…
Now don’t get me wrong – I am extremely grateful for the privileged life I had to be in a place with this love, this support, and this belief in me. And to be in a place where I thought this was all possible too! I had a support network that taught me and guided me.
I was on the path to success!
I checked the boxes at each step of the way – being enrolled in the honors and AP classes at my private all-girls school, getting accepted to amazing colleges, and ultimately getting an awesome job out of college. And once I landed the job, I had great success getting promoted and rewarded for my work. Success!
But why didn’t it always feel like success?
I would get to “the next step” that I had been working so hard for, and it didn’t feel that special. I would certainly celebrate because who doesn’t love a celebration?! But after that temporary moment, I felt empty. Like, okay, now what? And once I got to “the pinnacle” – my dream job, my adoring husband, my healthy two kids, my cute (albeit small) city house – why didn’t I feel satisfied? I should be happy. But I wasn’t. And my devilish curiosity led me down that path asking, “what brings real success, and hopefully then happiness?”
With further exploration, I now believe that everyone has their own definition of success if they are courageous enough to see that. The second part there is the gut-wrenching one. It takes courage to create your own definition different from how you may have been brought up and different from how society around you may define success. We all come from different backgrounds, with different strengths, and different passions. My vision for the ideal living situation isn’t the same as yours. So just as we are individuals and should honor that, we should also create a personalized definition of success rather than following society's expectation.
And success measurement doesn’t have to be connected to our work only. You are not defined by your job. So by only looking at job title and salary, we are missing out on a whole other set of options in life. Which then comes the even harder part – what does success look like for you? Time to shed those societal expectations and connect to your inner sage.
Create your success chart along with me using these guided questions as thought starters to help you realize how YOU define success in your life.
When you are 80 years old and look back at your life, what do you want to say you did?
If you could make a billboard to put in Times Square and send a message to others, what would it say?
What kind of impact do you want to make through your work?
If you didn’t have to work for money, what would you spend your time doing?
What brings you deep belly laughs?
What do you want to teach your kids/nieces/nephews about what is important in life?
What brings you joy?
What do you want less of in your life?
I'll be so curious to hear what you discover. Maybe you decide that job title and salary are your personal definitions and you like that. Or maybe you come up with something totally different than the author.
What's important is that you are creating something authentically you!
Join the Success Challenge! Send me a photo of your new pie chart and I will enter you into a raffle to win The Best Self Journal which I use and love to track my goals.