Quantify Success

I thought I would start off this week's post by telling you that writing this blog has really ignited my life and my soul. You probably remember that one of the reasons I decided to embark on this journey was to help others, and to help you chart the course to live the life you want to live. With that said, this blog in its short time has become a personal guide and stimulus toward unlocking obstacles in my own life. This blog has become a vehicle in which to further dissect research, thought and experiences and provide morsels of information that can be easily applied to your life. If you're like me, you may read books, and articles, listen to the media, scroll Facebook and find all this information regarding success, failure, triumph, achievement, and yet may not know how to apply this information to your life. This is something I have struggled with for as long as I can remember, being able to synthesize these nuggets of information and apply to my life. I'm constantly consuming all this information, and yet almost becoming paralyzed by the amount of information, because if I can't apply it, provide context and/or apply it, the information is useless. So how do I take this information, organize and package it so that fuels my life and yours? This blog has become that medium and a sifter of such information.

In my first blog post, I wrote about my realization that our kids see the world so much clearer than us as adults. The mere absence of a mature brain yielded an advantage and provided focus on the goal to be achieved. My second post, I wrote about how music provided an example of achieved success through struggle, how passion and motivation can help you overcome large odds. In the midst of writing last week's blog post, I kept coming back to this question of what it means to be successful. I realized, that I had been quantifying success all wrong. Until now, if I thought about what success meant to me, it was this abstract culmination of everything I wanted to achieve at this future point in time. It's funny, as I wrote that last sentence I laughed to myself, how silly is that concept that I was measuring success at the point of full attainment? So, in essence, the steps I have been taking towards this notion of success weren't fulfilling me. I wasn't celebrating and taking the time to live in these successes throughout my life because I wasn't at the full attainment of the greater "success." I have been failing myself and applying undue pressure to my life, all based on this full attainment concept of success.

I think sometimes we go through life and think we are not succeeding because we haven't achieved the career level, salary level, or made a big enough impact on the world, that we have set out to achieve. I have come to realize, each success needs to be realized as a building block toward your ultimate goals. Now, you read in my last post an excerpt from Simon Sinek, and I'll make another reference here (and probably more throughout these posts), as I find his observations to be spot on. In a recent interview that Simon had with Tom Bilyeu on the show Inside Quest, Simon was addressing his thoughts on Millennials in the Workplace. Talking about how the Millennial generation's (Millennial or Gen Y, born 1977 to 1995, "my generation") main characteristic are often defined by words like entitled, tough to manage, narcissistic, lazy and self –interested. If I am being honest, when I first heard these characteristics I was offended by the characteristic but will admit that I have a lot of these defining characteristics of my generation. It was a very interesting interview and I recommend watching it, here is the link. Now, I don't want to touch on all that was covered in this interview (though you will likely hear more about this in another post), there was one piece I want to bring into this post that I thought provided context to on quantifying success.

During the interview, Simon Sinek was ranting about how as a society he feels we are all about instant gratification. He then linked instant gratification to jobs satisfaction, in Millennials, and how you will find that this is the one thing that is not instantaneous. Simon went on to talk about the conversations he has had with kids just out of college in their first job, how they feel like they are not making an impact and want to quit their jobs. Simon then provides an example of how he believe they look at this abstract concept of impact by saying "it's as though they are standing at the base of a mountain and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world, which is the summit. What they don't see is the mountain." Think about that for a moment. When I first listened to this interview, I must have rewinded 5 times to listen to it again. This example captured a feeling that I could never put into words. For me, it is this abstract concept of success, which in this example is the summit, where the mountain to that summit is ill-defined. Where I fall short, is acknowledging the successes achieved as I climb toward the summit and fully visualizing the path that leads me to that summit. To add to my analogy, this abstract "summit" of success I have also appears foggy. It's as if the summit is covered in clouds, and not visible, yet I know it is there. I have come to realize that my summit hasn't yet been defined. I'll get to how I am working on defining my summit in a minute, but this example provides a great visualization that success needs to be found throughout the journey, not just at the summit. Realizing each little piece of success is just as important to climbing your mountain, as it is to reach your summit.

We all can relate to looking back at the end of our day and having this realization that we didn't really accomplish anything, but is that really true? You didn't accomplish anything? The reality is that it all comes down to how you quantify accomplishment and success. If success is always the summit and not the climb, you may end your day feeling that you didn't accomplish anything, but if you reframe your definition or quantification of success, to incorporate the individual pieces that add up to the greater success, you will find yourself energized and fueled to continue your climb toward your summit. Take out of your mindset that you have failed and reframe to recognize your successes. Realizing successes instead of the failures changes everything. I think that we all focus on what we didn't achieve versus what we actually did. Think about it right now as you're reading this, what were your successes today? Did you wake up? Did you get to work on time? Did you feed your kids and get them to school? Did you make your bed? All these things we tend to overlooked but they should be counted as successes. Especially the last one, our mothers would all love to know that we are all making our beds on a daily basis.

Choosing to accept each success as a building block of your ultimate goal or summit is yet another way that we can get our of our own way to live the life we want to live.

You have to start by first quantifying what success means to you, and only to you. Then once you have established this, then you must decide what your summit is.

So what can we do to help us realize our summit? I going to borrow an activity from one of Tim Ferris' podcast episodes (#214, How to Design a Life – Debbie Millman) to help us here. Listen to this podcast it if you get the chance, it provides a great example of perseverance despite failure. The episode featured Debbie Millman, who is a professor at The School of Visual Arts in New York. One exercise she has all her students complete involves writing an essay that she calls the "10-year plan for a remarkable life". The essence of this essay is to imagine what your life could be if you could do anything you wanted without any fear of failure. She describes it to her students by telling them to imagine what your life would look like ten years from now if you couldn't fail. She goes on to pose these questions:

What does your life look like? Describe your whole day, what are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house, where, what kind of sheets are on your bed?

She asks them to describe in great detail of what that life looks like in ten years, and to dream big with absolutely no fear. What a cool activity, right? Alright, so here is what I am going to propose you do in reference to this week's blog post topic, quantifying success. What does success looking like in 10 years? I challenge you to write this essay, and I will do the same. This activity, I think, will provide us the quantification of what success looks like and will uncover the individual pieces of that success that you can begin realizing in the shorter term. Additionally, throughout this next week take 5 minutes every day and recall your successes from that day. Write them down if you wish, but find ways to celebrate the climb as you move toward your summit. The climb is just as important as the summit, just as the journey is more important than the destination.