25 Definitions of Success from Very Accomplished People

Success Discriminates Against Your Thinking and Way of Life

Have you ever compared yourself to someone else? Doing so either puts yourself on a pedastal or you’ll put someone else up there and felt inadequate.

Sound familiar?

The prejudice you choose to have against yourself is holding you back from becoming the person you desire to be.

People tell me I’m very successful but why do I feel the opposite? I do what many people do, I compare my results to those who’ve been doing it for decades longer than I’ve been alive.

Comparing guest blogging websites I started to the websites Ariana Huffington leads, measuring my seminar audience sizes to that of Tony Robbins, and looking at how many books I’ve sold in relation to what Bob Proctor does in a month.

What is success? How does one actually define it?

Allow some of the world’s most accomplished individuals enlighten you on what success truly is.

1. Bob Proctor

Reaching the goal is not success; success is moving toward the goal.

2. Tony Robbins

My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain — and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.

3. Another Tony Robbins

Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.

4. Winston Churchill

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

5. Herman Cain

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

6. Jim Rohn

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something your pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become. For things to improve, you have to improve. For things to get better, you have to get better. For things to change, you have to change. When you change, everything changes for you.

7. Dale Carnegie

Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.

8. Woody Allen

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

9. Maya Angelou

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

10. Michelle Obama

Success isn’t about how much money you make. It’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.

11. Colin Powell

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

12. Jon Bon Jovi

Success is falling nine times and getting up 10.

13. Malcolm Forbes

Failure is success if we learn from it.

14. Coco Chanel

Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

15. Dalai Lama XIV

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

16. Nelson Mandela

Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.

17. Margaret Thatcher

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

18. George Bernard Shaw

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

19. Albert Einstein

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

20. David Brinkley

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

21. Martin Luther King Jr.

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.

22. George S. Patton

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

23. Booker T. Washington

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

24. Michael Jordan

I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.

25. Arianna Huffington

We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes — understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.

By looking over these definitions of success from very accomplsihed people, what’s the one that speaks directly to you?