Defining What Success Means to You

Before you can model the success of someone else, you need to define what it means to be successful. Without such a measure, you won’t know where to look for inspiration. Success means different things to different people. Certain guidelines can help you but, in the end, you must create the definition for yourself.

Another factor when determining success is the stage of the task or tasks you are using to measure your success. Short-term successes are not the same as lifelong goals. Distinguishing between the two is important. How you approach your plan will differ with each.

When you map out your success, you can choose to do it from a bottom-up approach or top-down. Bottom-up means you will use your short-term goals to define your longer-term goals. Doing it that way may seem backward to many people as they would believe you need to know what you want long-term before knowing how to proceed short-term. However, some people can work with a bottom-up approach. That is the way they think.

If you cannot come to grips with a bottom-up approach, then you should choose a top-down approach. You define your longer-term goals. Then, use those to figure out your shorter-term ones. You’ll end up with a map of the tasks needed to complete the longer-term goals.

Once you have your goals (whichever way you choose to define them), you can use that as a guide to model your success. You choose people who have similar goals to yours and use what they have done as a basis for your inspiration.

Admittedly, it is going to take some time finding the right people to model your success. You will need to read the profiles of several people before determining ones who have similar success profiles. However, this is a worthy exercise as you will learn about others as you read. You can choose to find inspirational videos such as TED talks, etc.

How you define success may change as you proceed with the discovery process. When you learn about people who don’t fit your defined success measures, it may open your eyes to other possibilities. Learning about these people can also give you a different perspective than you had before. The key is to keep an open mind.

Conversely, you may discover the people you thought were in line with your goals are quite different. We have notions of other people based on how others portray them. Then, you discover those people are nothing like portrayed, or like you thought they were.