In the new year, I wish everyone success. I’m not into resolutions, but as we go into 2019, let’s think about what we want our successes to look like. Whether it be in fitness, income, education, relationships, career advancement, etc, think about why that is something you need to accomplish. Are you doing it for you? Would you pursue this thing – would you reach for that target if no one was looking?
I encourage you to own your path to success by deciding exactly what it looks like and how to measure it. By being your own gatekeeper. That’s what I want for you in 2019. That’s what I want for you in life.
Vaguely Wishing for Success
Recently, I sat in a live webinar with one of my favorite nerds right now, Dr Shannon Irvine. She’s a neuropsychologist who teaches business strategy and hosts a podcast called Epic Success. The overall theme of the webinar was how to change your thinking to grow your business.
When she went into a section on limiting beliefs and the science of success, I started to think about how general my idea of success in life is. What really tugged at me was realizing that I hadn’t given myself clear metrics to measure my success. I just vaguely wished to eventually be wildly successful.
What are my targets? What am I aiming for here exactly? I even asked out loud, “How will I know if I made it, if I don’t know what it looks like?” So you get come along with me on a little quest. In a series of essays, I’m going to take a practical approach to nailing down these metrics for success.
Success by Whose Scale
It’s common for us to look at each other as successful or not. But the problem there is that we’re only capable of looking through the lenses of our own biases.
I think being a success is subjective. And it HAS TO be. Because if it isn’t based on our own terms, we will use someone else’s scale to measure how well we’re doing.
We know what that looks like. It’s going to law school when you want to be a singer. It’s playing football when you always loved the cello. It’s staying in the military for 20 years when you knew in 10 you weren’t cut out for it. It’s trapping yourself into false notions of what you should be doing. Your self-talk is full of should-be’s, should-have’s, and conflicting decisions.
There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like Gary Vaynerchuk: allowing someone else to define your success is not a healthy play — especially in the long term.
Personal vs Professional Goals: Two Sticks in the Same Popsicle
I need to define success for me, so I have those targets. I set out for my blueprint, roadmap, etc. This post is a tangible by-product of that process for me. When I began making notes for how I’d carry out defining success, I was reminded of a conflict between listing personal goals and listing professional goals.
In the Air Force, we had performance feedback worksheets — called the trusty Air Force Form 931 Airman Comprehensive Assessment Worksheet if you want to look it up. I remembered how much I struggled to understand why personal and professional goals weren’t the same. I get separating them for the sake of the feedback dialogue. It just seemed like the next logical step after discussing each kind of goal is to show where the goals overlap.
I’d love to dig up one of those older feedback worksheets to see my answers. Unfortunately, I burned down the whole work center when I left the military…That’s a joke. I fkn loved the Air Force!
Anyway, I didn’t intentionally save any of those performance documents. For the next post in this series, I will list my personal and professional goals then see where they connect. I’m curious about it, and I kind of feel like I need to say them out loud.
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