Defining Success Part Three (and Final)

I am not sure if it's just coincidence or not that as I thought about my own struggles with success this past week I kept coming across articles and conversations that only added more twists and turns to the complicated issue of how we define success as a culture and what it means for me personally.

I wanted to create some very pragmatic steps for defining success successfully (ha ha), but realized this is an impossible task because no equation will work for more than one person, let alone a whole slew of blog readers. What I have to offer instead are three principles that I think are crucial to add into your equation for defining success.

“Practical” things I do to define success:

1) clearly articulate my goals to myself and keep these distinct from what my employer stipulates as goals.

This doesn't mean you don't work hard to achieve the kind of goals laid out by your employer, because you probably won't keep your job if you aren't meeting those goals of course. It just means you don't use those goals to define yourself as successful because they’re someone else's goals and not yours. Sometimes the goals that define your job will align with your personal goals, and in fact if too often they do not it probably means you are in the wrong field. But it is good, I believe, to keep in mind that your employer’s goals have to do with making the company successful on its terms, not with making you successful on your terms.

2) ask myself often why I am doing this job

You might say this is a “getting back to the basics” practice, but I have found that one good way to accurately define success for myself is to stay in touch with some of my original reasons for getting on a particular career path. In my case, I really do love to read and to talk about what I read with others. I am in love with learning, and crave any environment that gets its vibe from pursuing ideas. These “whys” mean that I should be defining success by how often I get to talk about books and whether I am connected or not to an intellectual community. That’s stripping it down to the bare bones of course, but sometimes I think we need to do that when talking about something as abstract and lofty as “success.”

3) Recognize your life connects to others

Sometimes the best success stories come at a cost to other people. As much as I may try to convince myself of the lone wolf myth, my success not only depends on others but it also affects others.  It’s vital to check in with the people who are involved in your life and ask them how your personal goals are touching their lives, for good or bad. In my single-minded pursuit of a graduate degree and a job I rarely did this, and it means you can be left staring at the idol of your achievement and yet feeling like something is not quite right. I think our definitions of success need to become more communal. For me this means that success as an academic involves my life outside the ivory towers just as much as my teaching and research inside those towers.