How do you define success for yourself?

With all the media bombarded at us, and at the generation after us, most of us are conditioned to think and feel that success is defined by how much money we have, how many followers we have, and how many awards we have won.

I want to be contrarian, and argue that if what you define as success makes you intrinsically happy that supersedes any number of followers, awards, and cash in your bank account.

I observed the influence of the media even on my 5-year old niece, who had told me repeatedly how she wants to be an artist, and spends hours per day painting, sketching, and crafting, come home one day and tell me she wants to be a YouTuber; not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber, but I’m not seeing how her passion to be a YouTuber exceeds how much she wants to be an artist.

For example, if we have someone who has always wanted to be an author, but has put their passion and ambition to become a writer in order to pursue a career as lawyer because it pays well and gives them a perceived higher social status to mingle with the ‘right’ crowds, this individual could probably be happier if they had defined success their own way, and not the way their peers or anyone else around them define it.

BUT FAME AND MONEY MAKE THE WORLD GO AROUND, DOESN’T IT?

It doesn’t.

More often than not, people with a higher income and more savings are stuck in the vicious cycle of going to work miserable and yearning for the weeks and/or months of vacation they have accumulated. They aren’t engaged with their careers and soothe their own egos by telling themselves it’s not so bad if the pay if good and they can escape once in a while on a long vacation of sabbatical.

If you feel that fame and money make the world go around, it’s likely that you will end up being the one doing circles around fame and money on an unending chase.

WHAT ABOUT REALITY?

So you say, alright, I’ll define my own success and leave my cushy career to take a leap of faith. I still have to deal with reality and pay the bills.

Sure.

If you are in a career you are not happy with now, start mapping out the steps you have to take to get to where you want to be.

If you are that lawyer we talked about, and you want to become a lawyer, maybe you start practicing writing on a daily basis, then you start publishing short stories on your social channels or a blog to test the waters for reader feedback, and once you have some traction you write a ‘pilot’ of you first novel and send it off to a list of publishers to seek feedback (and hopefully a contract!)

You have to start being realistic about how to get from where you are to where you want to be; simply throwing up your hands and saying ‘but I’ve never done it before’ or it ‘it’s too hard for the type of person that I am’ then that’s exactly how it’s going to turn out. If you frame that as your reality, you WILL never get to do it, and you will always think it’s too hard so you will NOT get to where you want to be.

THE POINT IS, IT’S OK TO DREAM A DIFFERENT DREAM

Before you get caught up in how scary it is to alter your current reality and the comfortable status quo, let us reiterate that the point of this piece is to encourage you to dare to dream a different dream, one that doesn’t include the word ‘Unicorn’ or the title ‘Top 40 Under 40’.

If you dream of building a small agency in your hometown servicing local businesses you care about and that brings a smile to your face every day, go do that.

if you dream of painting the sunset in every country and then exhibiting these works at a gallery where all your friends and family can see it, then go do that.

Don’t let the media or your peers define what success (and the ensuing happiness) means to you. You define that because your life is yours to live and you are the only person responsible for your own happiness. If you are reflecting on your career now and there’s somewhere else you want to be, it’s time to put on your thinking hat and plan out how to get there!