THE VALUES OF SUCCESS

How would you define success? I suppose there are many ways – wealth, power, influence. One definition I like is that success is achieving your life mission within the confines of your values.

What do I mean by that?

Your life mission can be anything you want it to be. Essentially it can be described as the legacy you want to leave, how you want to be remembered by people. Author Steven Covey recommends writing the eulogy that you would like to have read out at your funeral. As drastic as that sounds, it is a way of putting on paper how you want to be remembered. A life mission statement is the compass by which you navigate your life, the destination toward which your choices and activities move you. It is also, to a degree, the measure of your success. Once you have defined your life mission, you are able to determine how you are doing in relation to where you want to be. Of course, success is not only about accomplishing your mission; it is also about doing the things now which need to be done in order to accomplish your mission.

For example, if you would like to be remembered as a great community leader, you are not only successful when you have become that, you are also successful every time you make a choice or carry out an action which positively moves you toward becoming a great community leader. It might start with a decision to assist in community projects, and then move on to offering to stand for various committees which arrange the projects and so on. Each of these steps is an indication of your success already achieved.

But there is another aspect to success. Success is achieving your mission within the confines of your values.

I like to think of values as the railway tracks of life. There are many ways to reach our destination, but our values, our tracks, hold us on the right path as we move toward achieving our goals. If we use our mission as our compass which determines our direction, but fail to put values in place, we can achieve that mission in many different ways, some of them good and others bad, some of them beneficial and some of them destructive. Just as important as achieving our goals is how we get there.

Let’s return to our aspirant community leader. How the person reaches the goal of becoming a community leader depends on their values. They can get there through generous giving of their time and skills, genuinely helping and improving the community without looking for reward or recognition. Or they can push people out the way who threaten their path to the top, focus more on achieving recognition as a leader than on the needs of the community, and engage in dubious deals in order to support their campaign. Without a firm set of good values in place, good railway tracks, it is possible to achieve even a good goal in all the wrong ways.

It can be more difficult to achieve you life mission when you are constrained by values, and are not free to move forward by any means. But ultimately success is about achieving your life mission, and achieving it in a positive way within the constraints of a good set of values.



THE VALUES OF SUCCESS - To learn more about this author, visit Jonathan Payne's Website.

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