A Different Kind of Success - Making a Quilt
Success takes on different meanings at different times in your life. What you deem successful at 20 years old is different at 40; what you think at 50 will probably be different at 65.
Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson list 4 components of enduring success, in a Harvard Business Review article, Success That Lasts:
- Happiness - feelings of pleasure or contentment about your life;
- Achievement – accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others strive for;
- Significance — the sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about; and
- Legacy — a way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to help others find future success.
The authors determined that if you remove any one of the components, it no longer feels like real success. They also say, “success that encompasses all four kinds of accomplishments is enriching.” Their research showed that
“those people who achieved satisfying, enduring, multidemensional success consciously went after victories in all four categories without losing touch with their values and special talents. It also showed that the high-powered people who experienced real satisfaction achieved it through the deliberate imposition of limits.”
It’s what we in midlife strive for: balance in our lives = success. The go-go years of our 20′s and perhaps our 30′s is behind us. We’ve come to the realization that there’s something more to life than working 60-80 hours a week. Although our Achievement component (See #2) is fulfilled, it might have been to the detriment of Happiness, Significance or Legacy.
In other words, while we’ve hit a home run to the executive suite, such success can feel short lived, like there’s something missing. We may make up for it in an overabundance of material goods (and food, alcohol and obligations), but at some point we come to feel a great chasm in our lives.
This is the point in life which I call Reinvention Opportunity. You could choose to have a midlife crisis as I explained in an earlier post. Or, you could choose success which is right in front of you. It takes a plan. It takes guts to ignore the naysayers in your life. It takes resiliency, for there will be tough times. It takes focus and tenacity. What do you choose?
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