Why You Need a Personal Definition of Success

In the past 5 years, there are many areas of my personal life where I’ve been stagnant or even lost ground in my personal development. 

I’ve learned the hard way that there are no guarantees that growth will take place, even if you’re relatively young. It’s certainly the case that in my late 20’s I expected amazing development to take place over the next 5 years, but that expectation doesn’t mean much without a plan.

The fact is, I had many plans, but I didn’t have a clear vision for what I was going after. I wanted everything equally, and so, in a very real sense, I wanted nothing in particular. I had vague ideas of what success would look like, but mostly I spent those five years bouncing around between different visions of my future, chasing whatever seemed most interesting in the moment.

Of course, plans are fragile and there’s nothing wrong with changing paths. Circumstances change, and we often need to change with them. Even our best plans will need to bend with the unpredictable ways that our life unfolds. But our definition of success should be something above our path that provides an overall trajectory for which to aim our efforts, and weigh our plans.

Why is it important to define your personal definition of success as early in life as possible? I can think of at least three reasons, based on my failure to do so sooner.

3 Reasons You Need a Personal Definition of Success

If you don’t define success for yourself, you’ll absorb it from others. 

From time to time, I become enamored by the lifestyle of some interesting person I learned about. And while it’s great to be inspired by others, and even take ideas from their lives, it’s unhelpful to constantly be jumping from one vision of your life to another without a core vision of your own. 

If you don’t choose what success means, you’ll be distracted in a million directions.

Without a core identity, and a definition of success that drives you, every new idea you hear becomes “the answer” to your problems and fear of missing out drives you to shift your energies in an entirely new direction.

If you don’t put a stake in the ground, you’ll never know if you’ve made progress.

The trouble with all of this shifting and changing directions is that you don’t exactly know where you’re going, and you have no way of measuring whether progress is being made. It’s quite ok to change your values, but rootlessess is one step further and makes it hard for your efforts to compound into something meaningful.

4 Ways I’m Defining Success in My Life Going Forward

In the next 5 years, I hope to channel much of my restlessness into a sustained effort in the same direction. I hope there are all sorts of surprises, adventures, and even unexpected opportunities along the way, but I want to be much more anchored in the kind of success I’m hoping to achieve.

After reflecting on that idea, here are a few ways in which I hope to define success in my own life.

To me, success means…

• Having positive, emotionally rich connections with my wife, kids, and friends nearly every single day. I want to be able to look back and have happy memories with the people I love in each season of life, and feel that I sufficiently squeezed the goodness out of each period.

• Being on a trajectory in which my perception of the mystery, power, beauty, and goodness of God are growing stronger with age. While these realities are true to me now, they are easy to ignore or devalue compared with the urgency and vividness of everyday life. I don’t want to see my spiritual muscles wither, but rather to grow into a source of joy in my later years.

• Investing in my health and well-being to the extent that each version of myself (40 year-old me, 50 year-old me, etc.) feels that I was a good steward of my body. I realize that health is never guaranteed, but it would make me sad to know I failed to invest in the thing which becomes more valuable than anything else when it’s under strain.

• Fighting hard against the tide of boredom and complacency by finding work to do that I find intrinsically motivating and genuinely good. Knowing myself better now than I ever have, I realize that curiosity and lifelong learning must be a central part of my life if I am to thrive and keep growing. This means I might occasionally pick up a new path, but the thread that ties it together will be a growing curiosity and a refusal to coast along with minimal effort. Whatever I do, I will do it with all my might.

That’s where I’m planning to go in the next 5 years. I hope you’ll keep following my journey and learn from my mistakes and successes along the way.