How To Be Successful in 3 Easy Steps
It isn’t hard, people.
These steps are assuming you have basic food, shelter and clothing covered. If you don’t, get off the internet and take care of that.
Step 1: Define Success
Defining success can be tricky.
Traditionally, success might be defined by the size of your bank account or job titles on your business card [or LinkedIn profile].
Whoever has the most money or power is the most successful, right?
Derek Sivers (musician, producer, circus performer, entrepreneur, TED speaker, and book publisher, among other things) had a different take:
When asked who is the most successful person he knew on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, Sivers answered Richard Branson, admitting that the first response off the top of your head is always bad. But then followed that up with:
“We can’t determine whether someone is successful without knowing their intent.
If Branson’s goal for his life was to live quietly next to a lake in the forrest, yet found himself incapable to doing anything other than starting and building stressful successful companies, then our view of his “success” might change.”
To be successful, you have to first define what success means for you.
With basic needs met, I would define success for me in the follwing ways:
- Time and flexibility to accomplish the next two items.
- Challenging myself to grow physically and mentally. That might be through personal running goals, daily journaling, working on difficult problems or projects, improving myself through reading and application of the lessons, etc.
- Fostering Relationships with the people I care about. Making the time for this is probably the most important and the most neglected thing.
Money and career success is great and can allow you more flexibility but I know plenty of miserable rich people. Plus, my hobbies are pretty cheap.
Step 2: Take Stock Of Your Current Situation
Now that you’ve defined success, you have to take a look at the man in the mirror to ask yourself if your current situation is working towards your version of success.
If I value time, challenging myself and relationships; assuming I have the same 24 hours everyone else does, I want to audit how I am spending that time and how my actions align with my goals.
If I commute for two hours every day, I have a terrible schedule and my job isn’t flexible, then I’m not getting closer to my goals of hanging with my people and taking on new challenges, like writing a weekly post on Medium.
I would need to make a change.
“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”
— Jim Rohn
Even if I make a TON of cash. If I have no time to spend it on my people, I would not consider my life to be successful.
You can always make more money, but you never get any more time.
Step 3: Take The First Step [or in this case, the third step]
Sometimes your situation can seem impossible. You might feel trapped at your shitty job, spend hours in your metal coffin sitting around all the other suckers on the freeway with a mortgage you can’t afford and hungry mouths to feed.
You can’t just quit and travel the world like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love.
I get it.
But you know where you’re going (Step 1). You know where you are (Step 2). Step 3 is about looking up the directions to your destination.
Knowing you probably aren’t going to get there overnight. Step 3 is to take one step towards your goal.
Just one.
Thinking about my version of success, my first step might be to negotiate to work from home one day per week (time), ask for a new project to work on at work or sign up for a race (challenging myself) or even the smallest of steps might be to make plans with friends with my limited available time (relationships).
After you take that first step then you can figure out the second step. Once you add up a bunch of little steps in the right direction, you’ll end up where you want to go.
As Tim Ferriss often reminds us, most of the time your goals in life, the things you’d do if you could do anything you wanted, don’t have to be deferred until retirement. Most important things just aren’t that expensive.
Ferriss has a blog post to help sort all of this out which is based on a section in his first book, the 4-hour Workweek.
As an example, I took a stab at the dreamline exercise below. My priorities have changed a bit since then but it is a good starting point.
Admittedly, this post is way more for me than anyone else. An attempt to refocus on what is important, get my mojo back and quit worrying about things that aren’t helping me achieve my goals.
