What is success?
What does that particular definition imply for our actions?
As we are looking for the path to a purpose-based economy (part 1 and part 2), asking ourselves what simple and transparent tools we can create to objectively measure the purpose of companies; we realized that several studies have focused on the link between personal purpose (ikigai in Japanese) and professional purpose. Aligning both can create immense value while a misalignment can have negative impacts on organizations and individuals.
What is personal purpose? How does it drive our actions? What is actually driving our actions? At Beyond, we are turning to philosophers, anthropologists, and even neuroscientists to get answers to those questions.
Spinoza showed us that our condition as human beings requires us to grow, Manfred Max-Neef explained to us that we are driven by Fundamental Human Needs and living a successful life is linked to fulfilling those needs.
But how do we define success? What does that particular definition imply for our actions?
As Alain de Botton well put it, if I tell you that I am introducing you to a very successful person; some images form in your mind right away, most probably it includes a certain definition of wealth. Clayton Christensen challenged us at the end of his life not to see the dollar metric as the only metric used to measure your life. It seems obvious but is it?
Tragedies have spent more time dissecting human failures than really trying to help us define success. Becoming successful is often linked in perception to happiness and it is no wonder that the coaching industry keeps growing as we search for ‘Me’ answers in a society that seems more foreign to us at least in the Western world. One of the most famous coaches, Tony Robbins tells us that “Success is doing what you want when you want, where you want, with whom you want as much as you want”
Is that it? What is the importance of the definition of success in our daily lives? Is success definition something that changes depending on where you live? Where you are born? Your gender? Your income?
We believe that understanding how as human beings we define success is of tremendous importance if we want to understand how to value positive impacts while reducing negative impacts. We need to identify and highlight beneficial priorities, exploring and redefining the principles of success, in order to restore the interaction between humanity’s activities and fundamental environments. Success is today being understood as something very culturally linked to individual values and very personal. However, we don’t spend enough time defining it and understanding how it guides our actions.
Help us in defining success by visiting definesuccess.net
