So You Want to be a Success?
By: Tim Kelly, MBA ’00, Polsky investor-in-residence
“Define success on your own terms, achieve it through your own passion,
and build a life you’re proud to have lived.”
– Anne Sweeney
I work with a lot of people seeking career advice, from business school students beginning their quest to find the ideal career to senior executives disenchanted with some aspect of their career.
I like to start every conversation with a seemingly simple question.
How do you define success?
The question is harder to answer than most initially think since “success” means something different to each of us. It’s not until we assign it certain attributes, or ways to measure and observe it, that we know what it means, and whether we are achieving it, or have achieved it.
“Success” means nothing until we define it
Not surprisingly, almost everyone defines success using some reference to levels of income or amounts of money.
These answers are reasonable since we live in a world where who we are and what we have achieved are often measured by where we work, what we do, the title on our business card, or how much we make.
With approximately 59% of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck, based on a recent Charles Schwab study[1], does this mean that a majority of Americans are unsuccessful? I dare say absolutely not, since how we define success is up to each of us individually.
For example, I recently asked a dear friend of mine, who is homeless, how he defines success. He was quick to reply: “I define success as staying off of drugs, cleaning up my life, with the goal of one day reuniting with my wife and daughter.” He said that his definition was a powerful motivator to making him a better person.
How can each of us achieve success then, as measured by more than merely our levels of income or how much net worth we amass over our lifetime? Here are five suggestions that I give every student and executive with whom I advise that is trying to achieve success in their career and life.
Identify people that you deem successful and ask yourself what makes them a success. Oftentimes, how we define success reflects the traits of people we perceive as being successful. The people that I viewed as being truly successful, and what made them successful in my mind, included:
- My father — an iron worker who prioritized loving and caring for family as one of life’s greatest achievements
- My brother — who never went to college, but whose vigilant focus on integrity and ethics led him to become a respected thought-leader and pre-eminent trader on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange
- A college professor — whose career as a promising attorney was denied him in the face of his unrelenting fight to support the sanctity of our First Amendment rights during the McCarthy era
Success to me has always had three basic components as a result of my role models: family first, living ethically and with integrity, and staying true to my principals. Identifying the attributes in others that we deem reflections of “success” help us to emulate those attributes in our own life and behaviors.
Identify what motivates you to do and be your best. Each of us is motivated by different factors and conditions that drive us to be better or to achieve more. My list of motivators includes: responsibility, a sense of camaraderie and partnership, being around really smart people that I can learn from, and working in ethical/respectful environments. Finding careers, employers, and environments that offer our particular motivators is like high performance fuel to a race car! Knowing the foundational elements for what drives us to excel is critical in performing at our best and achieving our version of success.
Establish guideposts to achieving your version of success. I love reading quotes, poems, and anecdotes on, admittedly, rather philosophical subjects. They help focus my mind on things that matter in life, providing the equivalent of guideposts for patterning behaviors around in hopes of one day being a success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, aptly entitled Success, is a cornerstone of how I define success and a powerful guidepost to one day achieving it:
“To laugh often and much: To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”
Similarly, I once read an article questioning whether we live our life with a focus on writing our resume or writing our eulogy? Do we focus on accomplishing business or monetary goals before we die; or, do we focus, instead, on how we will be remembered? Answering this question will help you define what success will mean to you. Find a quote, poem, epitaph of your own that will help guide you to being the success you desire one day to be.
Be your own free agent. Never forget that careers are rarely linear and almost never reflect a single decision to pursue a given employment opportunity. Careers usually consist of a series of positions, employers, and business endeavors across a lifetime. Whether you control this series, or whether it controls you, plays a large part in how successful you can be.
Achieving success requires you to actively manage your career and your own future. If you find you love the position you are in, the employer you are with, or the industry that you are part of, don’t fall victim to the Black Swan moment. Positions become redundant, employers merge or go out of business, and industries fall out of favor or change dramatically.
Success requires you to actively manage your career and life
Question what would you do if you found yourself without the job you now love, or if you were to wake up one morning despondent about the job that used to make you happy but doesn’t any longer. What skills would be required to pursue a different job, to transition to a different career path, or to recover from some other Black Swan career dilemma.
Always have a fallback strategy in mind to protect you in these instances. Always challenge yourself to develop new skills, explore new education, or seek out new contacts that could help you respond to such jarring career road bumps. Be willing to look elsewhere if your current job is no longer motivating you, or positioning you to be the success you want to be. Need new skills? Pursue them. Need a bigger or different network? Develop it. Success is something we constantly pursue, not something that just happens.
Success in relation to failure. When I was little boy, my parents would take me to a local restaurant that used paper placemats. These placemats always had a story or message to keep you busy while waiting for your order. One had a particularly dramatic impact on me.
The placemat was entitled “What is Success?” It contained a list of ten very prominent men from the 1920s that, it claimed, had a combined net worth that exceeded that of the US Treasury. Reading their names and positions left me in awe at the level of success they had achieved. At the bottom of the page was a question: Where were these men twenty years later?” Turning the placemat over, I discovered all ten men died of suicide in the wake of criminal indictments, spent time in jail for a variety of felonies, or died bankrupt. In the end, they were unquestionable failures, not successes by any measure.
Success is a spectrum while failure is absolute
While success can mean different things to each of us, literally a spectrum of different meanings, failure is far more finite. Failure to me means the irreparable loss of reputation or character. Almost any career periodically exposes people to opportunities to make a lot of money at the risk of loss of character or reputation. As a wise mentor of mine was advised: in these moments, always remember if you preserve your reputation and character you will have ample opportunity to make money again and again; the opposite does not ring true. Once you irreparably lose your reputation and character, it will be hard, if not impossible, to ever recover.
We each control our own future if you plan ahead and manage it actively. If you constantly ponder what success means to you, and are vigilant about pursuing a career and a life that satisfies your definition of that word, you will achieve it.
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you did it.” — Maya Angelou
