In the past five years, there are many areas of my personal life in which I’ve been stagnant or even lost ground in my development.
I’ve learned the hard way that there are no guarantees that growth will take place, even if you’re relatively young. It’s certainly the case that in my late 20s I expected to develop in significant ways over the next five years, but that expectation doesn’t mean much without a plan.
The fact is, I had many plans, but I didn’t have a clear vision for what I was going after. I wanted everything equally, and so, in a very real sense, I wanted nothing in particular. I had vague ideas of what success would look like, but mostly I spent those five years bouncing around between different visions of my future, chasing whatever seemed most interesting in the moment.
Of course, plans are fragile and there’s nothing wrong with changing paths. Circumstances change, and we often need to change with them. Even our best plans will need to bend with the unpredictable ways that our life unfolds. But our definition of success should be something above our path that provides an overall trajectory for which to aim our efforts and weigh our plans.
Why is it important to define your personal definition of success as early in life as possible? I can think of at least three reasons, based on my failure to do so sooner.
If you don’t define success for yourself, you’ll absorb a definition from others.
From time to time, I become enamored of the lifestyle of some interesting person I learned about. And while it’s great to be inspired by others, and even take ideas from their lives, it’s less helpful to constantly jump from one vision of your life to another without a core vision of your own.
If you don’t choose what success means, you’ll be pulled in a million directions.
Without a core identity, and a definition of success that drives you, every new idea you hear becomes “the answer” to your problem. A fear of missing out can then drive you to shift your energies in an entirely new direction.
If you don’t put a stake in the ground, you’ll never know whether you’ve made progress.
The trouble with all of this shifting and changing directions is that you don’t exactly know where you’re going, and you have no way of measuring whether progress is being made. It’s quite OK to change your values, but if that makes you rootless, it can become hard to ensure your efforts compound into something meaningful.
In the next five years, I hope to channel much of my restlessness into a sustained effort in one direction. I hope there will be all sorts of surprises, adventures, and even unexpected opportunities along the way, but I want to be more anchored in the specific types of success I’m hoping to achieve.
To me, success means:
That’s where I’m planning to go in the next five years. I hope I will learn from my mistakes and successes along the way.