The other day I came across a quote saying that no one who relies on a payslip ever made it to the Forbes list of the world’s richest.
While reading that, I paused for a moment and looked around at the people who were going about their business in this part of Africa and I asked myself, “How many of these people know what Forbes Magazine is, let alone how to get featured in it?”
With all these social media channels around us, some messages that are meant to be encouraging are nothing but dream stealers and killers; and that is why when we read them, we must apply some element of thought.
The above statement first of all presumes that being featured on the international lists of who-is-who is the ultimate definition of success. It also presumes that financial value supercedes all other evaluation factors.
Success means different things to different people. To some, raising orphans in their foster homes or child rescue centres is their definition of success. For some, a life of protecting forests of indigenous trees is their life dream. Will they be featured anywhere? Probably not. Have they made a difference to their world? Yes they have.
What is my point?
Define what success to you
This, you must do, with the knowledge that success is a process not a destination to be arrived at in a certain number of years and days. It is not a predetermined journey. There is no working nor proven formula for your defined success.
It is a daily, continous effort. It is a competitor-less marathon, not a sprint. It is a no-points-earned decathlon way of life that you need to consciously decide to take on. It doesn’t matter whether you are employed or not, in business as a start up or as a veteran, in philanthropy or money making ventures.
Just like a decathlon calls for discipline, commitment, varying inputs and input levels, your defined success will sometime require you to jump at opportunities, run from temptation, take a jab at frustration, swim from the drowning voices of complaints, ride into the sunset, throw away time wasters and heartlessly pierce the determined obstacles in your journey.
By defining what success is to you, you won’t have to worry about benchmarks that don’t measure your level of achievement. You also won’t get distracted by the calls to abandon your dream because it is not what society has come to expect out of you.
Friend, define your success and work it. Pursuing it means that it is running away from you and you don’t have a grip over it.
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