Success as most content presents it uses one measure: money, title, or fame. The problem isn’t those measures themselves, it’s accepting them as a ready-made definition without asking whether they actually mean anything to you.
Key Takeaways
- A borrowed definition of success, even a widely shared one, stays a measure of a life you haven’t lived.
- A single measurable number can feel clarifying in one context and become meaningless in another.
- Redefining success after a major shift is harder than the first definition, but more honest.
- The real question isn’t whether you’re successful by someone else’s measure, it’s what measure would make you feel, honestly, that you did something worthwhile.
- Writing your own definition in one sentence, without money or title, reveals how close your current work actually is to it.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
In a corporate technology role, success was clear and measurable: hitting sales targets, a percentage of a goal, revenue growth. When I moved into social impact work, there was no longer a single number telling me I’d succeeded. I had to redefine success for myself: did something real change in the life of someone I worked with, did I build something that lasts beyond my involvement. That new definition was harder than the first one, but it was more honest.
Success imported from someone else’s definition, even a standard widely shared in your field, stays a measure of a life you haven’t lived. The question worth asking isn’t am I successful by so-and-so’s measure, it’s what measure would make me feel, at the end of a workday, that I did something worthwhile, which is part of what Mastery, one of the five elements of The Method, asks of the work.
The Steps
Step 1: Write your current, unexamined definition of success as you’d state it today. You need the default version on paper before you can question it honestly.
Step 2: Remove money and title from that definition entirely. Those are the two measures most often inherited rather than chosen.
Step 3: Write what’s left in a single honest sentence. A sentence forces the same specificity that vague ambitions avoid.
Step 4: Compare your current work against that sentence, honestly. This comparison, not the definition alone, is what tells you whether anything needs to change.
A Worked Example
The definition that emerged once I removed the sales numbers I’d been measured by for years was simpler and harder to fake: whether something in someone’s actual life had changed because of the work, and whether it lasted after I stepped away.
Closing
Write your own definition of success in one sentence right now, without mentioning money or title, and see whether your current work moves toward it or away from it.
FAQ
What if my current definition still includes money in some form?
Money can remain a factor, but check whether it’s the measure itself or just a byproduct of the measure you actually care about.
How often should this definition be revisited?
After any major life shift, a career change, a new role, a significant loss, since those moments often reveal that an old definition no longer fits.
What if I can’t yet answer honestly?
Sit with the discomfort rather than defaulting back to the borrowed definition. The honest answer often takes longer to surface than the convenient one.
