What Is Your Success?

Everyone wants to be successful and the dream of every day is to complete activities that move you closer to this success. There’s social pressure to achieve success at particular times as set by the societal clock and it becomes more if you seem not to be moving as fast as your peers towards this success.? But first, what is this success that we are all chasing??

At the start of my career, all I wanted to do was become successful. How this was to be achieved remained unstrategized but I knew it was supposed to be as soon as possible. 6 years down the road, I have a different way of interpreting SUCCESS that I wish I learned earlier.

Success is a verb; and not a destination or metric as many people would believe. The ability to define what you want, how you want to get it and religious pursuance to achieve it is success. Here’s a practical example:-?

Person X wants to be a Data Scientist Lead in 7 years time. To achieve this, he will take up a Data science course for 4 years and a bootcamp for 6 months before joining the corporate world. Now, let’s break down success for this person X.?

The ability to draft this plan of what he wants is success already. It takes a lot of commitment and thought to pen down what you want and how you want to get it. His ability to start off the course is another success. Assuming he fails midway and contemplates quitting, but eventually stays in to complete what he started, that’s another success story. Completing the course and joining a data bootcamp is also a success. ?Success is everywhere, at all levels of life and how you define it matters a lot.?

Here’s the cheat code to define your success.

1. Draft a plan of your trajectory

This is the rule of the thumb. A plan is a pointer that helps you know the direction to take and consistently keeps you off deviations. Pursuing success without a plan is like winking in the dark - neither you or the people in the room can follow your actions.?

2. Prioritize your focus areas for optimal impact

It’s important to appreciate that you cannot do everything at the same time. Understanding the chronological flow of activities on your plan and their associated impact makes it easy to gather resources needed in pursuit. From the above example, person X focuses on completing the Data science course before the bootcamp due to the build-on knowledge factor.?

3. Conduct periodic personal audit

The agility and aggressiveness to pursue goals is needed all time, but it doesn’t have to take all 365 days in a year. It’s prudent to take frequent pauses to reflect and audit your progress as well as appreciate gains and lessons learned. This is a magical strategy that will help you realize how much you’ve accomplished, which sometimes may slip over you.?

Breaks are healthy and wise to distort the norm for a moment.?

4. Develop a start over again mindset

One thing I can guarantee you in pursuit for success is, you’re going to fail. The times you fail and how you do it doesn’t matter. What differentiates you from quitters is your ability to dust-up, pick your lessons and move on with the pursuit.?

You should develop a mindset that allows you to start over again and again, whenever you find yourself on the flip side. Failure is a recipe for success.?

5. Focus on yourself, your brand and your success

Remember WHY you started and had the plan in the first place. It was all for you. Resist the temptation to look around and what to achieve what your peers have, without necessarily understanding how they got it. You can draw inspiration from your peers and role models on how you navigate your journey, but you should always remember, your paths are incongruent.?

Instead, you should focus on building your brand and identity that will broaden your scope of defining Your SUCCESS, from Your Own LENS and Rules.?

What To Do Next??

Look around and reflect on your journey to date. There’s a lot of success you’ve achieved. Now, draft a plan that will help you define your success moving forward.?