How Do You Measure Success?

Success isn't all that it's cracked up to be... I'm serious! Stop laughing!

Well, success is important, very important in fact, depending on how you measure it. I going to give you an example of an imaginary "successful" individual. Let's call him Fred.

Fred starts work each day at 6am. Fred works 11 hours per day and travels one hour to get home. He is highly successful in his job and is the highest paid and most productive widget salesrep in the northern hemisphere.

Fred has a wife at home with their two children aged five and seven. Fred doesn't see his children much because he leaves before they are awake and they are almost ready for bed when he gets home. On the weekends he is unable to spend much time with his wife or children because he is networking and playing golf with the town's largest widget retailers.

Fred is extremely successful at his job. As we learned above, there is no widget rep in the northern hemisphere that comes close to him. The trouble with Fred is, however, he only measures success in dollars and cents. He doesn't see success as an all-encompassing journey.

Fred's children would much prefer he was a failed widget salesrep that was good at helping them with their homework. Fred's wife would much prefer he didn't always make bonus and occasionally lingered over a romantic dinner with her. He doesn't need to be good at the homework or dinner, he just needs to be there.

The trouble with success is we've become so fixated with being super human work junkies, we've forgotten what really matters most- being successful in our lives and relationships with our family and friends.

My advice is, next time you consider success, consider whether you're giving your family and friends all they need emotionally.