Defining Success on your own terms
Being successful means different things to different people. In fact, success can mean whatever we want it to mean and can be interpreted in many ways.
"There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed."
-- Ray Goforth
For me, the foundation of creating success is to start by fully owning who you are. Because owning yourself, your time or reclaiming it ultimately breeds a mentality that drives changes.
In today’s society working hard and hustling till you drop is probably what we commonly see or accept as a good measure to reach success in our careers.
The danger of the hustling mentality is that it creates a toxic environment where you become guilty of not overworking. You lose sight of your purpose, your why and you go by a ‘rise and grind’ culture. That precisely leads to burnout. We have this glamorised perspective of perfection being promoted through social media of what a successful person looks like, where they should live, what they should get access to etc. It looks amazing to make it big and it looks normal to indulge in a life of vanity that seems accessible at the click of a finger. In turn, normal life is promoted as boring, as a failure. Looking at success from that external point of view leads us to compare ourselves to those ‘others’. Whilst an internal perspective appreciates the steady, continuous, long game of growth by privileging ethics and values above possessions.
There are two type of mindsets – growth and fixed mindset.
Carol Dweck who is a renown Stanford professor, describes in her book Mindset, the fixed mindset as people who see their qualities as fixed traits that cannot change. Those who hold a fixed mindset believe that they are either good or bad at something based on their inherent nature.
On the opposite she describes people with a growth mindset as the ones who believe that they can get better at something by dedication of time, efforts and energy. Working on their flaws and the process as the most important components, not just the outcome. With time and practice, people with a growth mindset can achieve what they want.
There are lots of supports and tools exploring the concept of growth mindset. Knowing your own capability is probably where that journey starts. Self-awareness is all about exploring your integrity, being prepared to be vulnerable, and honest in your self-reflection. It is a journey. Being true about what you want in life and questioning if you are on a path to that will naturally prompt you to make the necessary adjustments in your life if you truly aspire for that success, that growth, that change etc. But it is also about assessing the tools that you have at your disposition to pursue that journey.
You cannot walk that path with a full load of weight that is not going to serve you. And by that you need to look at the people around you, your path, and the opportunity. You need to be mindful that these components play a big part in ripping out the layers of what constitute your values.
Values are clearly connected to the environment we gravitate within, and they evolve over the course of our life. They pivot, they shift, they fade.
Staying in integrity with the goals we have set for ourselves and evaluating that we have still the tools to do this contribute to success. Constant re-evaluation is a necessity to avoid a plateau. How we show up to control the narrative is our identity. Food for thoughts…
