Redefining Success

How do you define success? You’ve probably never sat down and thought about it. But you think you know success when you see it. No one ever challenged me to think about this until the Spring of 2008. Sitting in a Starbucks in Greenville, SC, a friend challenged my definition of success. For years, I had been operating under a definition of success I was not even aware of. Whether or not you are aware of it, I bet you define success subconsciously like I did…

If something is still open, still operating, still going, then it is successful. Existence equals success. The longer someone is in a job, a church is able to do church, an organization can keep their sign on the door, the more successful it is. Longevity equals success.

We’ve got it all wrong. Existence and longevity do not equal success. Just because you open your doors and people come in does not mean you are successful. Just because you get a paycheck does not mean you are successful. What if we redefined success and left the element of time out of it?

If we couldn’t use any element of time in our definition of success, what would we have to use to define it?

• Effectiveness.
• Focus.
• Purpose.
• Staying on course.
• Still doing what we started out to do.
• Thinking more about “why” than “what”.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of something accomplishing the things in that list? And if that something only lasted a year or five years or ten years, wouldn’t it be worth it? Wouldn’t it be successful? Yes!