George Allen Miller One Geek's take on all things SciFi

I wanted to start a series of posts with a central theme. Success. In this very first post of this topic, I want to define what success is. After all, you can’t really say you are successful or not if you don’t have a definition of it.

So, what is success? Technically speaking, and as you follow this blog you’ll notice I am a huge fan of literally definitions, the meaning of success is the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors also defined as a successful performance or achievement.

Have you ever gone to a reunion or been afraid to go thinking your old friends wouldn’t think you were a success? What were you using to base this opinion on? Is it just money, is that what makes us a success in life or not? Not if you read that definition above it’s not. Take me for instance, i’m not rich, as one of my previous posts will attest, am I then not successful? And doesn’t being successful at life have a whole host of other criteria? Raising kids, going to school, etc etc?

For me, I wanted to create a website, have people visit it and increase the traffic to it. This website has only been up for a month. I would say in that time frame that so far it’s been a success. Traffic has been going up, I’m commenting on it regularly and it feeds my need to write. Therefore, so far it’s a success.

People often get caught up in the notion that they are not a success in life. Someone I once talked to complained that they weren’t successful in life. I began to inquire with them more. They were working a job they loved and were in fact doing what they wanted to do. They were even doing it quite well. I then asked them, doesn’t that make you successful? They answered, but I’m not rich!

Being rich is certainly a means for success, if you weren’t rich before you became rich of course. Born rich, well, that’s not being successful that’s just being lucky. Don’t ever feel that someone is more successful than you simply because they are well off. Having money is not, in my opinion, a measure of success in life. It is a measure for one aspect of life, the accumulation of wealth, IF that was a goal you had set for yourself in the first place. You can only ever been successful at something if you are trying to be successful at it.

Ok, so now what. Well, as I intend this to be a series of steps you can take to become successful, we have to first define what it is. What we want to be successful at. So, lets pick something. Maybe it is money. Maybe it’s writing a book, or accomplishing some goal. Whatever it is, choose it. We’ll focus on one thing and one thing only.

Of course, this might be harder to do than you think. Choosing something as broad as “I want to be successful at life” is actually going down the wrong path. Life is vast. The reason this is a bad choice is there is no end game. When do you stop and say, “Yep, I was successful at life!”. You do it constantly, you take little opinions throughout life and say “Yep, I’m successful so far!”.

But for this experiment, it’s simply too broad. To get the taste of success, we should pick something that has a finite end. For me, it will be this website. The finite end to it is growing to 1000 visits a day for a 30 day period. To me, that is success. That is a well defined mission statement with a clear goal in sight.

Now your turn. Pick something that you want to be successful at. A hobby, a career goal, anything. Define the limits to it, when does it end, what will make it a success. Once you have what you want in your mind, we’ll go to the next step and build a road map for success.