The Riverside Press-Enterprise
How do you define, measure success?
We are told to follow our passions, to find something we love and do it with gusto. We are encouraged to pursue our dreams, and as a result of this pursuit, we will find success. This is a great way to approach life, and it is beneficial to have a positive outlook in general, but if we do follow our passions, how do we know when we are successful? How do we measure success? What does success mean to you?
There are so many ways to gauge success that I think it’s important to develop a clear sense of our motivation, the “why” and the “what for,” in order to be truly satisfied with our own approach to projects and the processes we use. And with a little luck, we’ll find happiness along the way to make the journey fulfilling and satisfying.
As we set out on any journey, we should know where we’re going and how we plan to get there. So we set up goals, smaller tasks that act as signposts to determine where we are in our journey, as part of our measuring system. Sometimes we refer to these signposts as “short-term goals,” while our “long-term goals” are simply the culmination of our plans.
So let’s look at a couple ways we can measure progress and gauge longterm success.
If we view success through a monetary lens, we can form a clear and well-defined measurement; the more money attached to an outcome, the more successful it is. Similarly, if a project is politically motivated and a desirable political outcome is achieved, you can count your project a success, more or less. Interestingly, both of these models illustrate how success is a range and not a fixed point. I think that’s important to remember — success can be a range of outcomes, some more successful than others but all of them “count.”
What about projects that don’t have a financial or political motivation, don’t have an obvious measuring stick with which to gauge them?
Take, for example, the act of writing. When you approach a writing project, how will you determine whether it has been successful or not? What will you use to measure your success?
Do you set a time limit or a word count per day or, like Nanowrimo, set a monthly goal with daily word targets? These approaches are valid ways to measure progress and success, the daily goals marking the path on the way to the finale. There are many other ways to approach a writing project and many different outcomes to aim for.
It helps to define your desired outcome, of course, and that in turn will help you determine how you will measure it, or how much you have met your goal, and to what measure you have achieved success.
In these cases, our short-term goals, (“I will wake up by 8 a.m.,” “I will eat lunch today,” etc.) can have a significant effect on your general outlook as you accomplish these tasks and experience these small successes. Broadly defined long-term goals are trickier by their very nature, but can be accomplished if they are realistic, attainable, and even a little challenging to keep things interesting.
If you are writing an essay and you say, “I want this essay to win the Pulitzer Prize,” you are narrowly defining what will qualify as a successful outcome, but is it a realistic goal? What if you say, “I hope this essay wins a prize.” You are still pinning your success on an outside force that you have no control over, but the goal is a bit more within reach. How about, “I hope I finish this essay in a timely manner.” Or, “I hope I like this essay.”
Happiness is a fantastic goal and one of the ultimate dreams to which we aspire. “Follow your dreams” and “Pursue your passions” are most often measured by the amount of happiness they bring. And that’s an admirable goal!
I think we confuse ourselves when we measure the success of a project with the incorrect metric. If, for example, you want to experiment with a different writing style — let’s say you’re normally a poet and you want to try your hand at writing fiction — but you measure the success of the project by the political impact it makes, you may be using the wrong measuring stick. What is your actual goal? What outcome do you want?
If you find something you enjoy doing, that’s a great thing. You should follow that dream and do it for the sheer pleasure of it. If you want to monetize your project, that’s a different thing with a different goal. Both pursuits are fine and both motivate you in different ways, but I think it’s important to know what you expect of your project when you set out on that journey. If you pursue the things that you are passionate about and those things bring you happiness, your journey will be fulfilling, and your successes will be innumerable.
Happy writing!