Personal Understanding of Success

How do you define success?

One way of doing it could be thinking that success is the moment you complete your work, knowing that you have done all you can (at this point) to bring out the work’s greatest potential.

I say “at this point”, because your work is only one diary entry. There will be another, and another. You may not be the ‘perfect’ guitarist, programmer or architect today and therefore your creations will also not be ‘perfect’. However knowing that you have given it all, with the faculties you had to your disposal at the time, is one way of framing success.

I say “the moment you complete your work” because success is a feeling that should occur in privacy, without the influence of external validation or opinion. This is because many of the external conditions are beyond your control and often happen. For example, there might be a more important launch that day, and your product was missed, the music producer was sick, and your demo was not heard, or an influential review who doesnt particularly like you gave a negative review of your book. On the flipside, the stars might align, and the project might be a “commercially successful” one, or you might bump into a famous investor on the plane who immediately gets your idea and invests the next week. Either way, none of those things have anything to do with “how good” your work is.

This is why anchoring and protecting your personal understanding of success is important.

To make each new song, picture, blog post, app, or poem, no matter where you stand on the ladder of public perception, without being attached to the outcome, will result in a work that will arrive in its truest form.