Rethinking That Word We Call Success

This year has been very different to every other year. I started my blogging career five years ago writing for a website called Addicted2Success. Now the name of that website and everything I’ve written is being challenged in my mind, the way a Tennis Grand Slam Final is played in the fifth set.

Rethinking success started with a conversation in a coffee shop, at an old Post Office down an iconic lane in Melbourne. It started with a sentence that produced an unusual reaction in me from a friend: “But you could just do your side hustle now and not work a 9–5.”

This is what success was when I started out. Having the laptop lifestyle the way my friend Joel did, who introduced me to blogging, seemed like the natural progression in life. You work hard for someone else and then you work for yourself and make up the rules, right? That’s success, isn’t it?

Working for yourself is not as glamorous as it sounds. For example, I can remember taking a few months off between changing careers and working for myself during this time. Do you know what it looked like? Let me tell you.

• Wake up at 9am instead of 5am.
• Ignore eating a healthy smoothie bowl and eat toast (or perhaps chocolate).
• Turn on the computer at 9:30am and attempt to do something that produces money.
• Get side-tracked by Youtube and call it an excuse to ‘get motivated.’
• Waste most of the morning and realize you’ve done no work.
• Put your head down in the afternoon and do some work and then at 5pm tell yourself it’s time to stop because you are so used to working in an office with those people who apparently ‘build someone else’s dream.’

At the end of the day, you look at what you’ve accomplished and realize the quality of work is rubbish and you did about as much work as you did between dinner and bedtime when you had a regular job.

Repeat this over and over and you quickly realize that maybe success is not what you think it is.

I explained this lifestyle to my friend in the coffee shop over a hipster lemongrass tea. He didn’t get it. He told me that these failed days must be a result of my mindset or motivation and that that’s what is responsible, not the idea of success I was chasing.

Motivation and mindset could have played a part, but why you do something and your version of success plays a much bigger part. During the months I worked on my side hustle, strangely, the analytics looked good. I was making money, reaching people and getting plenty of emails wanting me to do ‘work.’

These were things I wanted more of until I realized, “Do they even matter?”

When you get more of what you think you want, you can reach a stage like I did, where you realize that the cycle is broken. What you think you want doesn’t solve any real problem. What you think you want is a fantasy your mind tells you you want until you get it and realize your mind was wrong.

Everything you thought was what you want, and would lead to that triumphant word called success was wrong. You blindly followed the leader called success and it led you nowhere, into a cold pit of darkness.

You can’t talk about success without mentioning money. We all want more money, don’t we? After that coffee shop conversation and the deep reflection that followed — where I questioned my version of success — I realized that money was part of the delusion.

I took out my iPad, opened a blank notepad, and wrote down all the times I made lots of money. I then wrote down every time I felt really happy, excited, over the moon or fulfilled.

Guess what?

There was no correlation between the two lists. The moments where I felt amazing were not moments that involved making lots of money.

In fact, the opposite was true. The moments that had the most amount of happiness attached to them were when I wasn’t making any money at all and had a low amount of savings, minimal investments and bare bones passive income.

What did the happy moments have?

• A huge life struggle followed by a win (non-monetary)
• Family
• Someone I love
• A situation where I’d helped someone get through something

My parents came from a generation that worshipped money and I was supposed to carry the torch into the next generation. I haven’t carried that torch and probably won’t (not the way they expected, at least).

Every time I’ve solely chased money and success at the same time, it’s all gone to shit and I’ve lit my life on fire with a flamethrower and watched it burn in hell. The two just haven’t worked together.

Rethinking success is an ongoing idea for me. The young twenty-year-old that started out writing about being addicted to success and why it was good for all of us has changed. A few health challenges, a couple of career low points, a rollercoaster of money high and money low situations, romance turmoil, and one too many drinks when I was meant to be a teetotaler, have changed all of that.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s wisdom. Maybe it’s having the gates of my ego lowered. There’s probably not one answer.

Success in many circles is a dirty word because I don’t really think we know what it means. We think we know until we get our idea of success and realize that we know nothing at all. Without rethinking success, we can blindly follow a path that leads us to somewhere rather lonely and meaningless.

The pinnacle of your life — that you call success — may become the catalyst for going through the biggest low point you’ve ever experienced.

That may sound scary what I’ve just said. It’s not, though. Until you consciously rethink your idea of success, the only way you’ll go through the process is to have one of these epic low points. There are two options.

Option One: Rethink Success

Option Two: Let life knock you down and force you to rethink success

In my case, option two became my choice. If I’d known what I know now, it would have been preferential to do the hard work of rethinking success on my own, over a lemongrass tea.

Or maybe option two is not so bad after all. What does success mean to you?

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