Success defined

My friend Jonathan Snook recently wrote and asked what does success look like. He’s also been tweeting quite a bit about it as well and it got me to thinking.

I want to preface anything I say here with the fact that I am a privileged and lucky person. The family I was born into has made a huge difference to my life and where I’m at now and how I can define success. Because of that, I’m lucky to be able to define success in a different way than many people living on this planet or even in my country.

After mulling this over for quite some time, I now define success as having control over my own time and how I use it. For me that means that I’m successful when I have more time that is under my control. What this looks like in my life right now is not working more than one job and that job is mostly just the run-of-the-mill 40 hours a week.

What I would love that to look like in the future, to be honest, is working a job less than 40 hours a week, being able to work part time and use my other time for things that I enjoy doing that I don’t have time for when I work full time. Don’t get me wrong, I like my job, I like what I do, but there are a lot of other things I would love to do with my time that may not earn me any money or may earn me a lot less in the same amount of time as what I do now.

And time is one of the reasons I love to work remotely. By working from home, I have no commute and more time. This has translated in past years to being healthier by being able to fit in running and cooking healthier for us. So I can still work full time, but I’m definitely getting a benefit of more time in my life in other ways.

When I think of what success looks like to me, it means that down the road, I can have even more time that’s mine. Jonathan asked me what I would do with that time, and I have to admit that I have vague ideas, involving art, reading, writing, and volunteering, but the luxury is to be able to have the time to also figure that out.

Jonathan wrote another piece about overnight success which I also love, you should read it. TL;DR: no one is really an overnight success.