Define Your Own Version of Success For Your Small Business and Yourself

How do you measure your success?

Success has largely been taught as comparative metric. If you reach a certain target then you are successful. If we get a certain number of downloads then we have a successful podcast. A certain score on the SAT means getting into a better school or a worse school. A certain number of employees or level of revenue means you have a successful business. And god forbid, we measure ourselves against the perceived success of those we see posting about their own greatness on social media. All that can really get into your head and mess with your self worth.

Therefore, by measuring your success based on a comparison to others….another person, another business, another podcast…you are not accounting for the uniqueness of your situation, for all the variables that you have encountered and everything you have sacrificed to get to this point.

As Katie Zink, Founder at Social Construct Consulting, explained to us on The Business Over Beer Podcast, everyone’s version of success is different. It isn’t anybody’s job to deem someone else successful or not. It’s through your own version of success that you find your pathway. And as long as you have advocacy, a belief that there is a pathway, and there are resources available to lift barriers, then success should be the outcome.

This certainly applies to you, the small business owner. But there is a cultural component here to consider as well. Standardized success measurements disempower those individuals who have worked so hard to achieve a level they can achieve. As an example, in this episode, Business Over Beer Co-Host, Ben Surratt, tells the story from his childhood of a fellow student who was failing, and when that student brought home a C-, Ben literally found that laughable.

But for that student, it was success.

The amount of toil and sacrifice that it took to achieve the C- was the same as another student, with a different background, with a unique set of circumstances, who achieved an A+. Our culture has simply determined that an A+ is more successful than a C-, but that is not necessarily true.

Maybe you think that by celebrating a C- we are rewarding mediocrity. But the specific “metric”, the grade in this case, is not the measure of success. Rather, there is success in the achievement of a goal, we are celebrating progress, and rewarding a person’s desire to be better today than they were yesterday.

And in the end, isn’t that what’s important? It’s not about who is better or worse. Measure against yourself, and yourself only. When you do, it will help create a clearer vision for where you’re going. Not where someone else wants you go and not where someone else thinks you ought to be.

It’s up to you to define your own success and celebrate the hell out of it when you succeed. Share the resources you used and how you overcame the barriers to your success.

When you see others who have achieved success for themselves, do not compare their success to you yours, know that is how they have defined it for themselves and advocate for their continued success. When you see someone struggling to achieve success, work to lift barriers to help them succeed.

There is passage to success that exists for all of us, and it starts with you defining our own version of success.