Stop With The Fancy Suits And Pens

How do we define success and who cares?

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

People want to work with you when you’re successful.

So, when we’re at the beginning of our journeys, we hear things like “fake it ‘til you make it.”

This very well might be true for some people or industries, but it just never resonated with me. I feel that most of the time, there is no shame in telling others precisely where you are on the roadmap.

“Hey, I’m a beginner at this. I’d like to get to this other point eventually and I’m ready to do the work to get there, but right now, I could use some guidance.”

Most people who are further along are happy to help those who ask. It’s part of the “pay it forward” entrepreneur culture and if you’re hanging out the right people, it’ll just be part of their ethos.

Disambiguate

I feel that the trouble occurs when I see people defining success with visual cues instead of with data.

For instance, we’ve all heard this idea that if you wear a nice suit/dress to an interview, you’ll be more likely to get the job. I have no idea if that’s actually true, but the mistake being made is that money (visualized in the expensive clothing) is being displayed as the indicator of “success.”

That might be true some of the time, but your expensive shoes and monogrammed pen just aren’t signs of success everywhere and they certainly won’t help you be better at your job.

Defining success

Success, then, is really just a long list of accomplishments.

At a high-level, that’s it.

And I understand that this can be a really unsatisfying definition because there’s no summit you can reach and say “finally! I made it to the top!” There’s not a really clear ending point or even tipping point. I guess those details are up to you, the definer.

People want to work with you when you’re successful, when you’ve accomplished things, when you’ve won awards for your work. People want to work with you when you’ve done big things because they want to do big things.

The custom stationary and fancy conference booth don’t matter as much to the right people if you’ve got an impactful track record.

I hope this helps clarify a few things:

1. Defining success accurately helps set you up for more of it

2. The context in which you put yourself will define success for you

I think we often think of success in strictly tactical terms and not in such basic terms. I hope this helps add to your thinking and clarity of purpose.

Thanks for reading.