Defining Success For Yourself In Life and Creative Work
I’ll admit it. Sometimes, like lots of people, I try to chase perfection. These days it’s easier than ever to share things with others - we can do it at the click of a button. There is more opportunity for people to view (and judge) our work that we want to ensure there are no flaws before we unleash it on the world. The words we type, the art we create - everyone’s a critic, and the worst critic of all is usually ourselves. Every image that I photograph and every piece of writing that I create and share with the world, I second guess. Even these words I’m typing now, at some level, I am unsure of.
Whenever I listen to a groovy song, view a stunning photograph, read about a successful business, I always wonder about how many times the person who created them failed before they succeeded. Most likely it was hundreds, if not thousands. Some of us fail more or less than others - we are all different, and we arrive at our end goals in different ways, at different times. However, failure is often seen as a negative - how often do you see people sharing an utter failure on their facebook or Instagram pages? Naturally as humans we want to share our happiness and successes; but failure is a part of life too. Hell, it’s probably a bigger part of life than success is, especially when one is exploring uncharted territory like creating a work of art or starting a business from scratch.
There is something to be said about creating the perfect end product. Few things feel better than formulating an idea, creating it from scratch, and seeing it carried out exactly in the way that you pictured it from the start. However perfection rarely, if ever happens, and that word can mean so many things to different people. Pursuing excellence is never a bad thing, but allowing it to paralyze you to the point of inaction can negate hours of hard work and deprive yourself and the world of the joys of sharing your talents.
So, how can we know when something is excellent enough to put out there for all to see? How can we plunge into the depths of our doubts and swim back to the surface with a feeling of comfort and security around the things we do? It’s not an easy task, but each one of us has it in us. There’s more that goes into it than you might think. Let’s dive into the pool of doubt, perceived perfection, and the human psyche.
Determining What Success Means To You
Grab a pen and a piece of paper for this exercise. Once you’re ready, imagine yourself five, ten, twenty years in the future. I know this sounds like a cliche exercise, but stick with me here. Based on what you know about yourself now, at the end of that time frame, what would need to happen in your life for you to consider yourself successful? There is no right or wrong answer here - it’s your life, and the only person judging your success is you. Write out five to ten bullet points - personal or professional - that would qualify you for success in your eyes. Now, transport yourself back to the present. Draw a dash after each item you wrote down, then write down the activities that you are doing right now, on a day to day basis that are helping you achieve those long term bullet points you just wrote down. It’s possible that some of your long term goals might not have anything following the dash, and that’s ok. This exercise is meant to help you look at things from a bird’s eye view and understand the things that you value, and how you are (or are not) focusing your time on those things.
Let’s take it a step further. Think about some of the items on both sides of the list. Did you write them down because they are what you truly want to do and believe will bring you happiness? Or are you doing them for the approval of others, or because it is what society considers “successful”? Will they bring you true long term joy and fulfillment?
Much of the time if we don’t do things, it’s because we either a) don’t know where to start, or b) we are scared of failure. Failure can be in our own eyes, or it can be in the eyes of others. If your long term goals contained things like “Own my own business” or “Travel around the world” but they didn’t have anything that you are doing on a daily basis to make them happen, it’s important to stop and examine why you aren’t putting time into these things that you just told yourself are important. Is it because you’re scared of what your family might think of you if you quit your comfortable corporate job to start a knitting business? Or are you terrified to think about what might happen financially? Has that trip to a country you’ve always dreamed of visiting been postponed for good reasons, or do you simply not know how to start planning your dream vacation? It’s key to identify what is holding us back so that we can brainstorm how to get past those roadblocks.
When you look back on those success indicators that you wrote down in 20 years, the things you haven’t done will be the items that stand out. You’ll look at some of the line items that you neglected for what you probably considered practical reasons at the time, and wonder why you didn’t do those things. The key to adventure, joy, and keeping life exciting is sometimes taking a leap into the unknown, pushing your boundaries, trying things that you might, and probably will, fail at. It would be wonderful if we knew the outcome of our choices, but uncertainty is the thing that makes life interesting.
Changing your life rarely happens overnight. It takes days, months, years of hard work and persistence. And at the end of it all, we might not achieve our goals, which is incredibly frustrating to think about. Despite this, it’s important to remember that success isn’t always related to an end goal or to any type of accomplishment or accolades. Success can simply mean spending your time and your life doing things that you enjoy.
“You have this dream, this idea, of this awesome thing for years...and the truth is, no matter what you do, it will never be as great as it is in your mind. ”
At the end of this brainstorming exercise you should be able to define what is important to you, and what a successful life looks like in your eyes. Defining what your view of success means in your life, in your work, is incredibly important. It can mean the difference between a perceived triumph and a perceived failure. Most of the time, the things you do will never turn out exactly as you thought they would when you started. And that’s ok. It’s more than ok, it’s the beauty of life. If we knew how things would turn out before we even started them, there would be no enjoyment of the journey that takes us to the end point.
Now that we’ve narrowed down our goals, it’s time to start thinking about how we can perfect them. You didn’t think you would get away with half assing those passions of yours, did you? Goals can still be incredibly helpful to getting where we want to be - and I get it, we all need to pay the bills. But if possible, why not pay them from income we earned doing what we enjoy? If you consistently dedicate your time to an activity and do it to the best of your ability, the results will follow. It’s important to define what success means to you. If you don’t have that defined for yourself then you can’t focus your willpower (and more importantly, your time) appropriately.
Focusing Your Perfection
Now that we have an idea of what our long term goals might be and how we can build towards those, I want you to try another exercise. This one is called Big Rocks, and it comes from Stephen Covey’s acclaimed book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Brett McKay at the Art of Manliness does an awesome job illustrating this - I would highly recommend watching his video before going through this exercise on your own. We’re going to do the same thing, but on a piece of paper. His end point is a bit different from mine, however. Open a new page in your journal (if you don’t have one, this is a good chance to start!) or get a blank page from a notebook. Picture this page as a jar that represents the time you have in a day, or in a week, or in a month. Think about the things you spend most of your time on. For most of us the biggest rocks will be work, family time, etc. Draw several big rocks on the page, and write this activity inside of the rock. Do your best to match the amount of space that the rocks take up with the amount of time this activity takes up in your allotted period. Next, write in your medium rocks - things that you spend a good deal of time on, but less than your big rocks. These might be hobbies, or other tasks that take up a lot of time like housework. After that, you guessed it - add some small rocks in there. These might be lesser hobbies or regular errands like running to the grocery store. And finally, we have our sand that is filled in all around the rocks. These are things we do fairly often without maybe even consciously realizing how much time we spend on them, like scrolling Instagram or watching Netflix. It’s important to be realistic with yourself in this exercise - there is no right or wrong here!
Once our jar that represents the way we actually spend our time is done, I want you to repeat the exercise, but resize your rocks in the way that you would like them to fill your jar. For example, working at your day job is probably your biggest rock, but maybe you don’t like your job, or it’s takes up so much of your time that you can’t spend time on your hobbies or your passions. Draw this rock a little bit smaller, and make your hobbies a little bit bigger. You might even remove a few rocks - or more likely, some of the grains of sand. Once you’re done, compare the two of these. Seeing the ways you spend your time in a visual format can really help to open your eyes to the way you can change your patterns and focus on the things you care about.
Oftentimes I have found myself spending a lot of time on tasks that were relatively meaningless to me. I always try to do my best, and with these specific activities I maybe thought that if I did a great job on them it would benefit me in the future. I certainly advocate for having a high standard of excellence - the way you work on the little things strongly influences the way you work on the big things. However, there is a certain threshold that you hit where the additional time you invest in something provides a diminishing return. For example, I would spend hours working on spreadsheets that I had created to track my personal finances. I would ensure every credit card transaction was reconciled and tracked, every cash exchange meticulously logged, and would spend time analyzing where I could improve my spending and saving from month to month. And you know what? I spent all of that time staring at those files, and it didn’t change a damn thing. Sure, I could tell you exactly how much I spent on gas or cat food each year, but it wasn’t really providing me with the benefits, or the fulfillment, that I hoped for. I realized that my time spent perfecting my finances spreadsheets was providing me with diminishing returns, and committed to myself that I would spend less time working on them and devise a more simple way to track my finances. My accountant, OCD brain screamed at me when I neglected the sheets, but since cutting my time spent on my personal finances, my situation has actually improved. I had been focusing my perfection and my willpower on those sheets - which I didn’t truly enjoy and which got me no closer to my ideal life - all for nothing.
On the flip side, I will often spend hours or even days editing a photograph. Not once have I ever regretted doing this. For me, there is no better feeling than toying with the creative possibilities that I have at my fingertips and creating the exact image that I had in my mind and wanted to share with the world.
Are there tasks that you should be focusing more of your time on? Tasks that are getting in the way of the ones that are truly important to you? Oftentimes we can use menial tasks as a filler or a buffer between inaction and our priorities. The First Law of Inertia applies to more than just matter - it can be hard to gain momentum on a project when starting from scratch. When we’re stuck it’s tempting to use inconsequential tasks as an excuse to stay busy and deflect our focus from what we truly want to be working on. If you need to use these type of tasks as a boost to get into the zone, that’s totally fine. Whatever tactic you use, it’s important that at some point during your workflow you buckle down and work on only one thing at a time, prioritizing the things that mean the most to you.
Detachment From Results
“Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do. ”
You are a human. By design, you are not perfect. Oftentimes we can start working on something with a picture of how it’s going to turn out; rarely does it actually turn out the way we imagined - and that is ok. We are programmed to be obsessed with results. We measure data metrics, we critique our work against others, and overall, we assign an output to every input and judge success based on how others perceive the outcome. There are people out there who push the boundaries of what we are capable of - and it’s important to keep doing that. However, our obsession with progress isn’t necessarily healthy. “Progress” isn’t always a good thing. I wonder how many incredible artists and great minds are out there in the world that go undiscovered purely because they think that they aren’t good enough. The question is, good enough for who? The only person who you should critique to is yourself, and nobody else. If you like your work, and moreover, if you enjoy doing it, who cares what others think.
Many religions and philosophers cite detachment from the results of your actions as the path to true happiness with life. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t always strive for excellence, but more so that you shouldn’t get discouraged when things don’t go as you expected them to. We’re much better off taking things as they come, learning from our mistakes, and improving next time. I have work that I was disappointed with initially, but as time passed and I was able to look at it with a different point of view, it grew on me. There have also been times where I completely botched something. After the initial frustration or embarrassment, those moments have been some of my best sources of growth and inspiration. When I reflect on what led me to realize my mistake, I also try to look at the process as a whole and enjoy the circumstances that led to that mistake as well. As a great Zen master once said, “If you have one foot on the goal, you only have one foot on the path.”
When we climbed Acatenango, I had a vision of an amazing shot of the volcano erupting that I would get. It had to be at night so you could see all of the lava flowing down the mountain. In the foreground you would clearly be able to see something that would signify the magnitude of the mountain. After hours of attempts, this was the best result I was able to come up with during my only window when the clouds cleared. I’m still bummed at the fact that I wasn’t able to get the shot I wanted - it probably will be a long time until I get to see another volcano erupting at close range - but I learned a lot from my failure to get the image I wanted, and I had an amazing experience that was completely separate from the work I was trying to create.
Review, Revise, Retry, Repeat
Enjoy the process of creating, but remain critical about your work. Just like we set our benchmarks for success, it’s important to set a benchmark for the quality of work that we produce. While it’s still important to have a level that you consider successful, often times we don’t create solely for ourselves. Analyze the end goal of the assignment or project and base your results on what you hope to achieve.
Evaluate your work more than once. Often times I will return to an image after weeks, months, or years, and see it in a new light. It’s rarely possible to review things once and get the full value out of what you can learn from it and make all of the improvements to it that you can. Try different methods of review too. Once I started printing my work the way I perceived it completely changed. I went back to the drawing board on several past photos and completely revamped them; others were put aside, not quite making the cut. They just couldn’t live up to the big leagues (prints).
Enlist friends, family, and colleagues for feedback of your work. Oftentimes a non-biased, second set of eyes can see things much more clearly. They have the value of a Beginner’s Mind - a fresh take on the situation. If you’ve spent a decent amount of time studying something chances are you have a grasp of the concepts, principles, rules, and guidelines that go along with that subject. This can be restricting. Rules are meant to be broken, and concepts are meant to be challenged. Use them as a tool - when they serve you, implement them. When they don’t, do away with them.
You are where you are supposed to be. If you are passionate about something, keep working at it every day. Study the greats. Learn from them. Make mistakes. Learn from those too. Just don’t give up - that’s the one mistake that is most challenging to correct. And whatever you do, don’t give into the fear of imperfection. The world needs your talents to be out there, on display, for all to see.
“Don’t believe the popular idea that discounts self criticism....you need an unblinking, critical eye to measure your successes and failures. Look reality in the face. See where you need to work and grow, and examine your works with a high degree of critical analysis. How can they be improved? Good enough is not good...Do not stop until you are truly there, finished, and you feel a deep sense of satisfaction over what you have accomplished. ”
Stay Focused, Be You, and Do Good
The work we do is a reflection of how we spend our time, but it isn’t necessarily reflection of who we are as a person. As long as you are striving to improve the world and yourself and to share good things and do good deeds for others, everything you do is worthwhile.
