Success can be described in many ways. Someone once wrote that success isn’t where you are, but rather the distance you travelled to get there. That’s certainly one measure of success, but to accurately measure the degree of success achieved over the distance travelled, the obstacles overcome along the way have to be considered.
Someone else said success is doing something you enjoy and getting paid for it. That’s a cute definition, but even if you love your work as a middle manager and are well paid, if you have the capability to be a vice-president and want to be one, you’re still a work-in-progress as far as success goes.
There are many degrees of success. Major successes are long-term achievements that are the result of a series of many levels of minor successes. Consider, for example, aspiring young athletes for whom playing professionally is their definition of ultimate success. Along the way to this major success they will have many minor successes that contribute to their final goal, such as: a championship-winning home run, touchdown, basket, or goal; moving up through the minor leagues; having injury-free seasons; and being drafted by a professional team. If they reach their goal of becoming a professional, their definitions of success will then be reset to include achievements such as winning a scoring title or playing on a championship team.
For busy executive assistants, success might be simply having fewer items on their to-do list at the end of the day than were on it when they arrived at work. For anybody, a successful day could be one in which a particularly vexing item was eliminated from their list.
Success has many definitions because it means different things to different people, and can even mean different things to the same person at different times. A thousand-dollar sale might qualify as a great success for a sales trainee, but two years later the same sale made by the same person, now a seasoned veteran, would probably be considered routine.
Still another reason the definition of success is so elusive is that it’s not a static condition. It can exist in various forms for a very long time, such as a long and steady climb up the ladder to the top job in an organization, or it may last for only an afternoon, such as a hole-in-one.
Although there are many definitions of success, one constant is that success is always personal. Whatever you’re doing, and wherever you’re doing it, the opportunity for success is always there. It can be found at home, at work, at play, at school, and in all your relationships. Success is the reward you get for doing your best, and doing your best is always within your control. You can sometimes fool other people, but because you always know whether you’re doing your best you can’t fool yourself. No matter how things may look to others, you will always know whether you’re really succeeding.
The most important aspect of defining success is never to measure it by comparing yourself to someone else. Unless that other person’s circumstances are identical to yours (and they never are), you’re comparing apples and oranges. Another reason you shouldn’t measure success by comparing yourself with others is that even though you may not realize it because you don’t know their true potential, they, by not doing their very best to reach it, may actually be failing.
While seeking success there are four overriding considerations to keep in mind:
1) You can’t sit back and wait for things to happen, you have to make them happen.
2) Having the desire to succeed is important, but having the will to earn it is essential.
3) A setback is not a failure unless you quit.
4) No amount of success at work can compensate for failure at home.