Is your definition yours or are you trying to live up to some else’s idea?
 

If you Google “success”, you’ll come up with some 400,000,000 hits. Google “success quotations” and you’ll find 11,400. “Success in life”, and you’ll have 1,100,000 options from which to choose.

It seems that people love success quotes. I’ve selected a few. Perhaps you might be curious about what they have in common:

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” —Bob Dylan

“Getting what you go after is success; liking it while you are getting it is happiness.” —Anonymous

Does success have common factors?

The only common factor in most quotations about success is that they’re all someone else’s notion of what success is—or ought to be.

I often find people walking around with someone else’s neat, cool, pithy success definition swimming in their mind. It’s a nice idea, but at 9:00 Monday morning, when they’re mired in their own mis-alignment, confusion, self-doubt and mis-direction, they’re still attempting to gain “success” by mimicking another’s dream. If they fail, it’s against someone else’s definition. Even if they succeed, that’s still true.

How can you feel good if your triumphs are not your own? Why should you feel bad if your disasters aren’t your own either? Surely true success must be against your own definition of what works for you? Anything else is synthetic.

The most important tool for success is deep reflection, which many cannot or will not undertake. As a result, they live a life of indecision and dis-harmony, with little or no alignment between what they say, feel, think and do.

Isn’t success all about results?

A good many people today do define success as “results”. But getting results without learning something about yourself leads to an incomplete and often unsuccessful life. Doing alone (i.e. getting results) without being who and what you need to be is not a solid formula for success—the “successful” Bernie Ebbers of Enron and all the others who ended up in ignominy and infamy are testaments to this fact.

Many who accomplish results without personal growth wonder why they still don’t feel alive and fulfilled; why they don’t experience good health, energy and full enthusiasm for life; why they lack fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability.

How can you claim to be successful if you don’t have well-being and peace of mind along with those longed-for results? Did you even choose which results count?

Washed away by events

The idea of success being equal to external results makes it ephemeral. Bad times, like those we have today, can come along without notice and obliterate everything you’ve made your measure of a successful life—just as if you wrote the word “success” in the sand on the beach and it was wiped out by an incoming a wave.

Some natural disaster, a health issue, job loss, divorce, accident, old age, bank failure—any of these can destroy success for many people. Yet others weather such ‘disasters’ and still keep their equilibrium. Perhaps the secret of true success can be glimpsed in discerning the difference.

Making your own success

There’s success and there’s success: the one based on external factors and subject to constant insecurity; the other internal and far more resistant to bad times.

Truly being successful requires a conscious exploration of what success means to you—creating your own quote. Unless you take the time to define success for yourself, there’s a good chance someone else is defining success for you. Is that OK?. Can you live up to something that you didn’t really choose for yourself? If you lack you own success quotation, perhaps today is the ideal time to begin to create one.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• Do you consider yourself successful? How did you come to be a “success?”
• What are the criteria you are using? Are they yours or taken from someone else?
• Do you ever feel empty or unfulfilled even though you are a success? If so, why do you think that’s so?
• How much of your life is spent doing what you think you should do as opposed to doing what you want to do?
• Do you find meaning, fulfillment and happiness in your life? Do you have fun? If not, why not?

“Even the most daring and accomplished people have undergone tremendous difficulty. In fact, the more successful they became, the more they attributed their success to the lessons learned during their most difficult times. Adversity is our teacher. When we view adversity as a guide towards greater inner growth, we will then learn to accept the wisdom our soul came into this life to learn.” —Barbara Rose

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