Define success so that you can tell when you get there.April 20 2007
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At one point in my life I had several people approach me independently and tell me that their goal in life was to become as successful as me.
Let me tell you! I was both suprised and shocked. Suprised that anyone would consider me, a person so far away from the achievement of his personal ambitions, "successful", and shocked that people could have such pathetically low ambitions for own their life!!!
But this got me thinking ... what is this thing called "success" that everyone pursues?
I started out by asking a few people around me to actually define what success meant to them and I found no one could give me an concrete answer. Everyone knew that they wanted it but no one, including me, could define it.
In those days my sister was also my accountant and I asked her for her opinion. She didn't know but suggested that if we could first identify examples of people whom we considered successful, and then we could then determine the personal characteristics which they shared in common.
We wracked brains for a few minutes noting that the current Prime Minister of Canada seemed to be a failure at his job and noting as well that many prominient and accomplished people seemed also to be considered lacking in some way that denied them the status of being considered as an ultimate success. Finally we settled on two people. The first was a former Prime Minister of Canada named Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and the second was our mother.
So what on earth could a prominent and popular politician with a Ph.D. from Harvard have in common with a high school educated war bride and stay at home mother?
This was a puzzle, one that I carried with me for years, but I came to decide that the common factor shared by these two people, and many people like them, was that they "prevailed on the their own terms". That is they took on whatever challenges in their life, achieved many but not all of their goals, and did it all without comprimising their core values or giving up on the ideals that they started out with in life. As Frank Sinatra put it, "I did it my way!"
The wonderful thing about this realization is that we all have in us the potential to become enormously successful, given perseverance and loyalty to the values and the ideals which we know to be true.
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