What is your standard for success?

Take a minute to visualise a successful person in your mind. What would he or she look like? One successful person might have a sports car, a mansion, and a wonderful set of friends. Another successful person could be a volunteer in a developing country. Yet another successful person might be an ordinary boy or girl going to university.

Success is measurable. However, the standards against which we measure success are different for each and every person, meaning that different interpretations of success exist.

For some people, success is defined by how much income one earns and the total value of one's assets, the so called 'net worth'. This approach has become overgeneralised to the extent that most of us associate a wealthy person as highly successful (and usually powerful).

There is some merit in this view. For example, in order to assemble and maintain such vast wealth and money, one must work very hard, not just for one or two years, but for decades on end. On the other hand, there are cases in which such wealth is either inherited or acquired unethically and without much committment, in which case our view of success might change.

Mike Bloomberg, in an interview, pointed out that, while his net worth is in the billions, that is not the standard against which he judges his success.

Mike said the following:

"As mayor of New York City, I judged the success of the team that I led by the number of lives we saved, the number of business opportunities we created, and the number of young people we managed to send to college."

Savings lives, creating business opportunities, and sending young people to university are not the 'conventional' measures of success, perhaps because these indicators go beyond the individual.

This, then, leads onto the purpose of this post, which is highlight that defining success is a very opaque task, where there is room for much debate and controversy, principally because our views on the matter differ.

The important thing to remember is that YOU define your own success by choosing the standard against which to judge it. Your standard is likely to change over the course of your lifetime and such change should be embraced.

Remain open-minded and choose your standard carefully, for the standard you select often reveals a lot about you.