What and where is success?
If you’ve reached a certain age in life, maybe up until around your early 20’s, you’d have come across or might have even formed your own definition of what success looks like. More money, a great career, owning properties, being able to tick off your travel bucket list, or starting a family might be in it.
Success is then a set of goals on an elevated platform somewhere in the future. We chase, climb and yearn for those goals because they represent happiness. That, by being successful, you’ll naturally feel happy about it.
Somehow it doesn’t feel right. Whenever a goal is met, I sometimes wonder why I was so obsessed on it for; to the point that the dreams bring more happiness than the goals themselves. Now, success is a good thing and it should give you a sense of happiness and pride but I feel like we have the wrong idea about what success truly is.
I was watching Chef’s Table on Netflix for the 5th time and it had never occurred to me how deep and impactful Enrique Olvera’s quote was towards the end of his episode. “I don’t think about success in terms of recognition. I think, success is [uh] being proud of what you do everyday.” I felt the weight of that comment only now.
Success exists right now, in every day of our lives — success is a way of life that we are happy and proud of being. Am I proud of what I am doing right now? Am I happy about what I am currently doing and where I have placed myself? And if the answer is no, then am I doing something about it or am I just being a bystander as I watch myself fail and be miserable?
While I’m writing this, I am subjected to much frustration, and borderline anger, towards myself. I have started doing a better way of prioritizing my tasks by planning three essential tasks for the day. Just three. Whenever I fail to do so, I carry it over to the day after. In the past four days, I’ve been carrying over two tasks over and over again — I can’t seem to touch it. I am not proud of this and I am doing something about this right now.
For today’s improvement:
If I carry over a task twice, I will make a decision: either to drop it altogether and terminate it out of my life because it’s clear I am not prioritizing it enough or I will drop everything I’m doing right now and get it done.
It’s not a matter of giving myself an ultimatum but to give myself an exit out of this procrastination loop. I am simplifying my decision making. If I’m using ‘my time is valuable’ as an excuse, then carrying over tasks is a waste of my time. These carried over tasks are not letting through other important tasks that I should get on with. It’s stunting my momentum and progress and in the process, learning a bad habit of lying to myself.
Being proud of what you do every day is what defines success. Being accountable for what you do daily breeds this pride.
