Success means different things to different people and there is no one way of defining it. The organisation you are working at, your university department, your family, the culture you were brought up in and your friends might have their own way of defining and understanding it. For them it might seem ‘the only’ and ‘the right’ way. But what success means to you is very personal.
We can associate different senses with our vision of success and what it represents. Can you pause for a second and ask yourself what success means to you? What comes up for you? Are you on the right path towards where you want to be, or does it feel like you are following somebody else’s road to success? You can always change if this is not what you want.
As Arianna Huffington writes in her book Thrive: ‘To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving’. She continues: ‘Every conversation I had seemed to eventually come around to the same dilemmas we are all facing – the stress of overbusyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and with one another. The space, the gaps, the pauses, the silence – those things that allow us to generate and recharge – had all but disappeared in my own life and in the lives of so many I knew.’
How much is well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving present in your life? Do you feel there is enough space and quietness?
Keeping all in balance is an art that we get better with through experience, through understanding better what matters most in our lives, what priorities we have and what values we live by. Often it doesn’t matter so much if things get off balance but how quickly we can reinstate the equilibrium that centres us in our lives – or at least come closer to it.
How does success look, feel or smell like for you?