Success in Partnership with a Great Life

Defining career success against how you want to live your life and not what you want to achieve.
“ WHAT WAS I THINKING?!” is too often our knee jerk response when we take a step back and pull out our dusty list of yearly goals. For whether it is in reaction to our overly optimistic plans or our less than ideal choices since their creation, we are quick to criticize our path, fast to overlook achievements and make it too easy to compare ourselves against others.
It is in our human nature to love the land of ideals, to bask in the thought of how we will look, feel and be with just a little more time and an extra bit of effort under our belt.
Did you plan on taking a major step forward in your race to be the youngest CEO at your company but instead spent most of your time staring at blank spreadsheets at 11pm? Or did you plan on hitting the gym to lose that last 20 pounds but realized that you can’t seem to stop going out to dinner with friends?
As evidenced by my recent posts, I have been in major goal assessment phase for the past few months and feel like I have just cracked the nut by focusing on answering how I want to spend my time.
Really Focus on What You Want Your Life to Look Like
I came to this realization after an incredible two-week work trip, in which I bounced around the country, spending 1–2 days in vastly different places like Fort Wayne, Miami, San Diego and Spokane. In each city, I was lucky enough to spend my days with great people who loved life, loved work and who had all created for themselves very different ways to living, despite the commonality of what we did that brought us together.
This made me reflect upon how everyone wants to find success and meaning in their life, but not everyone is truly honest with what kind of life they want to have or what kind of life they are willing to have to make their dreams a reality. And yet, I hope that question made you pause, because success is important but perhaps it is best found when experienced in partnership with a great life instead of at the expense of one.
The question you should be asking yourself isn’t what do you want to achieve, but what do you want your life to be like, day to day, hour to hour. Only when you have a clear understanding of how you want to spend your time, can you begin to make meaningful goals to get you there.
Think Big, Change Small
Once I had a clearer image on how I wanted to experience my life, I began to cast my net wide pulling in every idea I could imagine on what I wanted to do to get me there and what success would look like. This meant not only thinking up new ideas, but spending time reflecting on what I had already committed to understand if they were still aligned or to mourn them and move on. This step is the one that very often we short-change ourselves on, deciding to choose those ideas that seem doable or expected. So mix it up! Go talk to new people and ask them the questions you are asking yourself. Be open to inspiration from unexpected places, like your children, a tv show or your annoying co-worker.
However, the most critical step comes after you have painted the big picture because there is nothing more intimidating than stating that you want to own your own business in 10 years to enable a bi-coastal lifestyle and then wonder how the heck to make it happen!
As everyone who has failed their New Year’s Resolutions (which is statistically proven to be about 99.9% of the human population), putting the plan into action is typically the hardest thing to do. Luckily this time you are 100% certain on why you are setting each goal because you are creating the ability to live the life you want.
Just to make sure, gut check yourself by spending a week time-tracking how you actually spend your time. I found that there is nothing more powerful than creating this big plan, setting a few daily, weekly or monthly goals to get you there only to realize that NOTHING about how you really spend your time matches! By comparing your big goals against your small actions, you can begin to empower change and start living that dream life today, even if in 15-minute increments!
Go and Live
This is the one that I am still working on and probably the most important because even the best laid plans and most aligned dreams can go off course. Sometimes its because life got in the way, sometimes its because you learned something new about you that pulled you in a new direction. Guess what, THAT’S OK! When ready, start the process again. Or don’t, and just enjoy the sunshine of everyday life.
In the end, I realized how important themes like creative conversations, being around like-minded people and unplanned moments of inspiration really are to my overall happiness, especially when coupled with friends, family and the ocean. This meant that I need greater flexibility in where/how I work and greater decision-making over who I work with which has been the foundation for my newly designed 10-year career goal.
My parting words, don’t over think it all. Do what feels right, celebrate the planned and unplanned, and be true to yourself. But when you find yourself wondering “how did I get here” hopefully the above will give you some food for thought and some direction to self-correct.
Enjoy every minute of this adventure we call life. Don’t waste a minute of it striving for success at the expense of living it- find a way to bring them together!
