The True Meaning of Success
I’ve always liked this definition of success from Dave Kekich. He wrote, “You’re successful when you like who and what you are.
Success includes achievement…while choosing and directing your own activities. It means enjoying intimate relationships and loving what you do in life.”
Today, Bob Bly gives you his own definition of success and a secret to achieving it. Craig Ballantyne, editor Early to Rise
You control your life.
Your success is your responsibility.
If you don’t know what success is, how are you going to get there?
By Bob Bly
A few years ago, I was part of a panel of supposedly successful people speaking to a room packed with about a thousand college seniors.
Our topic: how to be successful.
When it was my turn, I asked the students: “How many of you want to be successful?” Every hand in the room shot up.
I then asked: “Who can tell me what success is?” Not a single hand in the room was raised. “If you don’t know what success is,” I asked the students, “then how are you going to get there?”
This is the dilemma facing many people I meet today. They desperately want to be “successful.” But when you ask them what that would mean, they either can’t give you a definitive answer, or they say it would be becoming a millionaire. They define success by how much money they have because that’s how the world keeps score. But does becoming a millionaire really make you successful? Continue reading
Work in the Future
Back in 1963 Bob Dylan wrote
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Those lyrics seem eerily appropriate almost fifty years later.
In that time many things have changed, change seemed rapid and incessant. Over the years the way we work has also changed. Back in the 1960′s the U.S. was primarily made up of Blue collar workers. Now we are increasingly white collar tellecommuters.
A recent special report in Time magazine entitled “The Way We’ll Work” explained the work situation in this way:
Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25-year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls.
