Success your way

What is your def­i­n­i­tion of success?

I was talk­ing to a friend of mine the other day and ask­ing him to imag­ine how his life would be dif­fer­ent if he was finan­cially suc­cess­ful. I was men­tion­ing the typ­i­cal things that most suc­cess books and pro­grams have you imag­ine, new car, great home, being able to travel where ever you. He said, “Well, those don’t really excite me. What excites me is being able to take any class I wanted no mat­ter how expensive.”

Con­trary to what the media would have us think, suc­cess is not the same for every­one. For exam­ple, if I was CEO of GM, (which is pretty improb­a­ble) I would feel like a fail­ure. It’s because it doesn’t have mean­ing to me. Now, being a best sell­ing author, that would feel successful.

In the next post I will share an amaz­ing exer­cise that, if you take the time to do it, will give you a real insight into what your def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess is. In the mean time, I’m going to share a won­der­ful tip that I learned a num­ber of years ago.  Get a lit­tle note­book that can be your suc­cess jour­nal. Doc­u­ment the lit­tle moments of the day when things worked or you felt suc­cess­ful. (You can also take five min­utes at the end of the day also) One per­son I sug­gested this to went from years of impa­tience, high stress, and never feel­ing like any­thing he did was enough to feel­ing a sense of peace and hap­pi­ness. Ulti­mately, is that what it’s all about? Oh, don’t read back what you wrote for at least a month. When you do, notice the pat­terns you begin to see in your posts. It will give you a lot of infor­ma­tion about is really impor­tant to you. Enjoy!

These are his words:

“I wanted to pass on that I’ve been dili­gent about the ‘daily diary’ — writ­ing down the lit­tle suc­cesses and the good things that hap­pen in the moment.

The expe­ri­ence has been truly trans­for­ma­tional. It’s amaz­ing how a small thing like this can make such a big dif­fer­ence. I find myself look­ing for the good so I can write it down in my diary, whereas before, I’d go from one prob­lem to the next with­out tak­ing time to ‘enjoy.’”