How do you measure #success?
I’ve been thinking about this question since launching my book last week. My first thought was to #measure the book’s success by sales, since that is a number that is easy to track. But I didn’t write the book to become a best-selling author; that would be nice, but it’s not in my control. If I measured myself primarily on sales, I’d be linking my day-to-day emotions to events out of my control, happy on the days it sold well and disappointed on the days it didn’t, and I don’t want to ride that roller coaster.
Instead, I return to my 2023 intention to connect with courage and vulnerability. That’s less quantitative, but still measurable. A few ways in which I connected while launching the book:
— I put myself into the book while writing. Several of my clients have said they feel like I am speaking directly to them while they were reading the book.
— I asked for help and support from my community while launching the book, and they responded. Friends and clients bought the book and recommended it to others, and wrote 26 5-star reviews on Amazon in the first week.
— People found the book useful. I had a college friend share at the book launch party that the book helped her navigate a current dilemma. That was moving to me, as I wrote the book to help people get unstuck, and this was evidence that it is fulfilling that intention.
While it’s important to track the quantitative output metrics, what we control is how we show up and our own actions. Rather than wait until we see the results to decide how we did, we can be successful each day that we consistently act with #integrity and in alignment with our #values. David Whyte’s words “Good work, done well for the right reasons and with an end in mind” express a similar sentiment.
How do you intend to show up in your interactions with others? What values do you intend to express? If you align your actions each day with those intentions, I would call that success.