My very favorite quote about success comes from that fount of vernacular wisdom, Bill Cosby. When asked to give a definition of the word, he replied, “I don’t have any idea what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.” I couldn’t agree more.
It’s easy to look outside ourselves for a description of what personal success will look and feel like: “Loads of money,” says one voice. “Lots of power,” says another. “Luxurious lifestyle,” says a third. Others may think success is about prestige or press accolades or popular approval.
Sometimes, life may seem like the game reflected in the bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It’s easy to feel like a failure when your pile of “toys” is smaller than someone else’s, and the income someone else earns is twice yours with half the apparent labor. But, as a very wise Book puts it: “The race isn’t always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.”
Life is not a formula, nor is there a perfect universal formula for achieving success.
I do know that I can have no sense of personal success unless I am working on achieving goals I have set by methods and measures I have chosen. I refuse to relinquish to others the power to judge when and if I am successful. From whom did I learn this posture of defining success for myself? From sources as widely disparate as Bill Gates and Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln and Helen Keller, Thoreau and Mother Theresa.
When I launched into network marketing in late February of 2005, it wasn’t from a sense of high calling, nor because I had any thoughts of achieving “success” by most network marketing standards. Necessity drove my choices. At fifty-five, I found myself unemployable in traditional work settings. The decades of “success” – and I have tangible markers of those successes taking up space in my closets and filing cabinets – in other professional venues did not seem to matter. No one wanted to hire me no matter how successful I had been or how many degrees I have. I was simply too old.
I knew it would take me a year or more to master a very steep learning curve, to become familiar enough with a whole new arena of business life and technical skill and specialized knowledge to even know if I liked it, to carry my real-life ‘brand’ as an advocate of hope into the virtual world. I knew I wanted to lay a firm foundation upon which to begin to build. The progress toward that mastery was what mattered to me most this past year. There are many very foolish people-users on the internet; I didn’t want to join their number. I decided that I would set myself apart by integrity, by the breadth of my knowledge base, by the ability to communicate complex concepts winsomely, and by the hallmark of an attitude of willing, hope-based service.
I never look at success itself. It’s one of those semi-goals like happiness that is a by-product, not an end-product. I concentrate only on progress and that in the smallest amounts of time relevant to my life. I take stock of my day at the end of it and, trusting that I’ll get to wake to a new one, make some plans relative to the next 24 hours. Tentatively, I might sketch out a week or two in advance with broad, expectant strokes, ready to go back and fill in if the lines seem to hold as the days pass and just as ready to smudge them out and turn them into the backdrop for a whole new drawing. “Back to the drawing board” – “Is this ‘Plan M’ or ‘Plan N’ we’re working on?" – and my favorite from Indiana Jones, that master of existential flexibility: “I’m making this up as I go along.”
What I do spend a lot of time concentrating on is my relationships, how I might best give good gifts and to whom, how I might interact with any who cross my path – even electronically – to give them a blessing, to add something to each life rather than to diminish that life in any way. All my goals involve people and interacting with them in some way, ideally in a mutually beneficial way, whether that benefit is financial or not. None of my goals ever involves reducing anyone to a ladder rung, a stepping stone or a scapegoat. This way, I have nothing to regret and a light and free heart as I go about my work.
This all means that my progress toward my goals is hard to graph. My “success chart” has the elegance of a 4th order calculus equation – no pie chart, but progressive movement and passion and purpose.
So, how am I doing with my “progress” toward my business goals? Well, I’ve developed some splendid networks of peers on the net who are writers and artists and web publishers and entrepreneurs of various sorts; some of them ask me what I do to earn money other than write and edit and advocate for hope – and then some join me in one of my network marketing enterprises when I tell them.
During the past year I’ve developed retail businesses and decided I’m not crazy about that, but that I do personal mentoring rather well and look forward to doing more and more of that. What I’m best at – and always have been; this is what the awards were for – is helping people understand how to do something they want to do and do it better, helping them find resources and answers and inspiration and a reason to live, helping them to define ‘success’ for themselves.
After a year on the internet, I’ve learned the basics of how to operate a web site that functions to accomplish mixed goals. It doesn’t fit the norm and so shouldn’t be profitable, but it is. It shouldn’t garner me better leads than ‘professional leads programs,’ but it does. Go figure.
I’ve decided to add a mentoring site – Christian Women Worth Watching – in the coming months. I don’t know if it will ‘succeed,’ but the vision for it is certainly progressing.
This past year has helped me decide on an internal organizing principle for my business choices: health conscious products, organic where possible, life-giving and planet-preserving and not people-using. In the first quarter of the 21st century, these are also wise financial choices if you’re shopping for a business – just ask Paul Zane Pilzer, the guru of the trillion-dollar wellness industry.
I do believe it is possible to generate income from several ‘streams,’ to build networks of contacts, to use the network marketing milieu to achieve personal financial goals. But what’s really important is to decide for yourself what’s really important, what you want to make progress toward.
If I have had any real ‘success’ this past year as I have pursued my goals it is because of one single principle I’ve incorporated into my outlook: Joyful acceptance of the givens of life is the beginning point for forward movement toward a goal. Resentment of the successes of others, bitterness over past losses, wishing things were different -- these will only hold you back from pressing forward toward your own unique experience of being a successful person.
Concentrate on consistent progress rather than on success. If I can help you clarify those goals, help you hone your definition of progress or success, direct you toward resources for learning this ‘joyful acceptance’ I allude to, or mentor you in any of my chosen network marketing venues, let me know!
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Visit Georgia Ana Larson at her personal web site:
www.aBrighterCandle.com
Read about her recent physical healing thanks
to a remarkable network marketing product:
www.PainFreewithAcai.com
