“…And he was rich, yes, richer than a king
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine—we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.”
—Excerpted from the poem “Richard Cory”
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Wealth, fame, physical beauty—these are our *cultural* measures of success.
Yet, we see people every day who seem to have it all, and end up getting hooked on drugs, stealing, hurting themselves or others, or, like Richard Cory, committing suicide.
It seems that no matter how much “success” someone appears to have, it’s an external measure—by someone else’s measuring stick—not one’s own. Despite all the good “fortune” in the world, there can exist an empty space inside of a person that never gets filled.
I used to offer a service to my readers, once or twice a year, to help them figure out for themselves what “success” means to them—not how their parents define success, not how their company defines success, and not how our culture defines success; not how their neighbors define it, not how they used to define it, but how they choose to define it for themselves, TODAY.
I want to offer this complimentary service to my readers again over the next ten days. The whole process takes about 30 minutes, and I’ve been told by some of the people who took advantage of it in the past that it was a significant turning point in their lives.
The goal of this exercise is to understand how to simply, richly, and accurately describe how YOU define success. The process starts with me asking you to think about how you would finish either of the two following statements in three different areas of your life:
“I know how successful I am by how…”, or
“I know I’m successful when…”
Here are a couple of examples:
I know how successful I am by how…
…many whims I am chasing.
…much passive income I have.
…easily my ideas convert to revenue streams.
I know I am successful when…
…I can live anywhere in the world that I choose, at any time.
…I have a feeling I am giving my very best effort to everything I do.
…I can wake up every morning of every day and decide what I will do today.
If you contact me, I will be happy to spend thirty minutes going through this exercise with you, free of charge.
I know that this work can help you in two important ways:
Instant prioritizing. YOU know what’s important to you, whether you know you know it or not. By working on these answers together, we can automatically lower the priority of many of the distractions and “false idols” in your life, in order to reveal the truth about what matters to you most.
Ongoing filtering. You can continue to filter and screen everything that comes into your life by the value system we discover here, thereby protecting yourself from future distractions on the road to your *personal* success.
Until you’re clear on how YOU define “success”, it will continue to be defined for you by others, and it may never meet your internal expectations.
is an additional resource that can be found on my Free Downloads page. The workbook provides more examples to assist you in creating your own measures of success, instructing you on how to “tweak” your answer until it truly resonates.
No matter what you do, don’t despair; get help. You’ll get wherever you want to go if you just keep REACHING…
