How to Define Your Success and Achieve it Too.

A practical guide to ensure you never fail.

Success is like a choose your own adventure book.

Think back to the last time you achieved it. What defined it for you?

Did you don the black gown and throw your mortar board into the air? Did you show that person the thing you’ve been capable of all along? Did you bake a cake without a packet mix, and maintain the kitchen as a disaster-free zone? Did you clear your debt? Buy your first house? Change someone’s life for the better?

Any one of these can be deemed a success story, because success is relative: if you take to Google and search ‘most successful people of all time’, Bill Gates is your leading answer. To take a stab in the dark, nobody reading this right now is destined to become the next world-leading magnate, so does that mean none of us will ever be truly successful?

As the Microsoft Founder himself put it, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they cannot lose”.

You see, success isn’t synonymous with brains, money, charm or fame. George Clooney may be the epitome of most of these things but nobody looks at the road he took to get there. Success is a result of the blood, sweat and tears endured to get to where you want to go. Oxford defines it loud and clear: “[it’s] the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”.

Perhaps what you didn’t know is that ‘success’ is derived from the Latin word ‘successus’ (try saying that 17 times fast), which literally means to come close after.

To come close after what? Here’s where the blood, sweat and tears come in.

Nobody reads a novel with the pure intent of getting to the end, unless you’re an English major or law student. We read for the escapade, the developing romance, the clever prose and the twist you never saw coming. Tolkien could have saved himself seventeen years and nine thousand pages had he shortened his trilogy to the critical events. Imagine this: Good and evil wage war over a piece of jewellery. Good wins. The end. But there’s a reason his work is consistently esteemed a masterpiece.

The greater the journey, the more toil and hardship endured, the sweeter the success. But you have to embrace the process it takes to get you there, and ensure the end result is what success means to you.

Success is for everyone

When I was a child, small Japanese children at piano recitals were the bane of my existence. They were the Mozart to my Salieri; the Buzz to my Woody. These pocket-sized kids stole all the attention and blew everybody away with the amount of gusto and precision exhibited from their minute, nimble hands. I’d compare my 10-year-old self with the 6-year-olds and contemplate: it’s because they have really strict parents, or: it’s a cultural thing. To which my Dad would rebut: no, they just work hard.

Needless to say I didn’t grow up to be the next Chopin or Bartok, but luckily for me and everybody else, success comes in all sizes and forms. Perhaps your version is to own a house, have a family, house chickens and maintain the perfect herb garden, and that’s great. Such a life doesn’t materialise overnight so embrace the process you undertake to get there. If your version is to be the greatest entrepreneur of all time, that’s great too, but your road to success will be a little less Pride and Prejudice and a little more War and Peace. As long as the outcome is what you set out to achieve, your end result is by definition a success.

I don’t know what success means to me, how do I define it?

It’s a big question and there’s no textbook answer, but the better you know yourself, the clearer your definition will be. If you’re attune to your gifts and what makes you happy, you’re already likely to succeed. Dr Caroline Leaf puts it like this:

“It is important to remind yourself that the law of the brain is diversity: there is no ‘normal’ human, and if you try to be like Einstein or Celine Dion, you will fail. You make a lousy someone else, but a perfect you… it is up to you, therefore, to design your own blueprint for success”

So how do we get to know ourselves better? Think about what you can see yourself doing happily for the rest of your life; Not with the elimination of hardship, but with the presence of fulfilment. Think about the types of work that give you energy, as opposed to draining you ofit. Think about the interests, hobbies and activities that captivated the best part of your childhood. Chances are you’re still passionate about these things now.

Do things that make you a better version of you, not a second-grade replica of somebody else. You’ll be happier, more energised, and- best of all- more successful for it.