To Be Successful

If you want go ahead and watch it.

First of all, I quite liked the video. I thought that many of the points were real­ly inter­est­ing and wor­thy of remark. If you would like to hear my take on the 7 points he raised (and a few oth­er thoughts I have on the top­ic) com­ment some­thing below!

As I watched a thought kept on haunt­ing me — the char­ac­ter­is­tics this guy is talk­ing about, the end game result that he is allud­ing to, the ulti­mate objec­tive and how a per­son is meant to derive their own indi­vid­ual val­ue as a human — is it all about how much cash you make in the end of the day?

This thought grew stronger… is human val­ue the same as the size of their bank account? Is my val­ue the size of my and account? What have I been fight­ing for? What am I teach­ing my stu­dents to aspire, fight and accomplish?

This is real­ly about how I define “suc­cess”. 

Now, I am sor­ry if this is a bit con­tro­ver­sial… I am not try­ing to be con­tentious, it is just what I have learned in life so far. For me, suc­cess is all about being able to achieve a del­i­cate bal­ance between:

• short and long term income;
  
• per­son­al time;
• time for those you love;
• the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of your busi­ness activity;
• your con­tri­bu­tion to life.

In the first part of this arti­cle I am going to explore the first 3 and on the next part I will wrap up the last two and a conclusion. 

Short and Long Term Income

Well, when we are only focused on mak­ing some mon­ey we can sac­ri­fice a lot to achieve short term gain. While this may be an impor­tant imme­di­ate objec­tive, in the long term this short­sight­ed greed will be clos­ing off options and pos­si­bly under­cut­ting your long term. Suc­cess there­fore is just as much about how much rev­enue you have right now as it is about focus­ing less on cur­rent rev­enue and build­ing some­thing that will last with you in the future. 

Personal Time

Yes! This is fun­da­men­tal. I was talk­ing to a sci­en­tist the oth­er day about how doc­tors can under­take DNA test of blas­to­cysts (if you don’t know what this is about, you need more per­son­al time!). The result of our con­ver­sa­tion was that we explored a very cre­ative way of solv­ing a prob­lem which in turn inspired a thought on how my stu­dent could solve a busi­ness issue. Suc­cess is about hav­ing time to invest in you. In your phys­i­cal and men­tal health, in the stim­u­lus of learn­ing and the pur­suit of your hob­bies and inter­est. This will make you a MUCH more well round­ed indi­vid­ual and you will gain inspi­ra­tion from the oth­er fields that will give you com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in every­thing you do. 

Time for those we love

Gen­eros­i­ty is amaz­ing. I have a fam­i­ly friend, Jaime, who epit­o­mizes this. One time he was on a trip over­seas and he saw this amaz­ing pen. It was fun, inter­est­ing and use­ful and so he bought one for him­self. He thought: man this is a real­ly good pen, good enough for me, so there must be oth­ers who could like it too. So he went ahead and about anoth­er 5! He then would share the sto­ry of this pen and if he still have one he would offer the per­son this pen. He sim­ply was a very gen­er­ous guy… For me this one of the most amaz­ing expres­sions of suc­cess: to be able to be gen­er­ous offer­ing things you val­ue (phys­i­cal things or even your time!) to peo­ple who you care about. If you invest in the peo­ple you can about, with­out any hid­den agen­da, your are much clos­er to being a suc­cess­ful person!

I want to hear from you… What do you think? How do you judge your suc­cess? How do you per­ceive value?