Over the last week, I’ve been reading “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. And while every page of that book is overflowing with wisdom, there was one passage about how we measure success that really caught my attention. 

Eckhart writes, 

“Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment. And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action.”

He then offers an example of a business person who works really hard for two years straight, and after intense strain and stress, the business person’s work leads to the creation of a profitable product that makes them a lot of money.

After setting the scene, he reflects on the example and says, “Success? In conventional terms, yes. [But] in reality, you spent two years polluting your body as well as the earth with negative energy, made yourself and the others around you miserable, and affected many others you never even met” (Tolle 271).

With this take, Eckhart points out that the conventional metrics we use for success (i.e. excessively hard work, income/wealth, and a perceived lack of the need to rest/recharge, etc.) may not actually be true success. Because if we focus too intently on these conventional success metrics, we may end up neglecting other things that are more important to us (for example, our health, our relationships, or actually experiencing our lives!).

If we care too much about conventional success, we may fail to achieve personal success.

After reading Eckhart’s book, I had a conversation with a fellow coach about success metrics. When I shared the book quote with her. She told me that she has to keep her own unique success metrics for herself. Because if she doesn’t, she feels she loses sight of what’s really important to her. 

We expressed how easy it is to get caught up in the hustle of trying to be “successful.” And how we’ve noticed that being “conventionally” successful actually gets in the way of us being the people we want to be. 

She shared with me that when she focused intently on being a successful person business and career wise, she no longer enjoyed spending time with her partner and children. When she  pursued “success” elsewhere, she was no longer present with the people she loved the most in the world. And when she was with them, she felt strongly that she was “supposed” to be doing something else.

This is exactly what Eckhart was talking about. A mad world tells us success is elsewhere, so we spend our time pursuing it so intently that we can’t see ourselves devaluing the things that are important to us in the present moment.

When she saw this in herself, my friend took a step back and re-evaluated her “success metrics.” She knew that for her personally, her relationship with her partner and children was extremely important to her. So she decided to begin measuring her personal success based on her relationship with them (and a few other things she wanted to prioritize) instead. 

Redefining Your Success Metrics

This conversation inspired me to re-evaluate my own success metrics, to take control over how I measure my own success instead of allowing society to measure it for me. 

The steps I took to do this are as follows, so if you’d like to do the same for yourself, go ahead and follow these steps :).

1. Ask people you trust and love what they believe makes a person successful (besides the amount of money they have). Tip: Encourage them to try to think of things that are different from our culture’s standard success symbols. So try to find something that isn’t like having a higher education degree or having a culturally respected job like a doctor, lawyer, or financial planner. 
2. Then ask yourself that same question, what do you think makes a person successful besides our culture’s standard metrics for success? (There is no right way to answer this! It can be anything you want it to be.)
3. Next, ask yourself, “What do I value?” and “What is most important to me?” This could be characteristics like “responsibility,” “respect,” or “integrity.” But it also could be people or experiences in your life like “my best friend,” “my family,” “music,” “hiking,” etc. The things you value may differ from what society or other people value. Noticing this is the first step to freeing yourself from the social pressure to be conventionally successful. 
4. Write down all of these responses.
5. Finally, ask yourself, “How do I want to measure my own success? What metrics do I want to use?” And pick some things that stand out to you from the lists you wrote down before.

Note: picking your own success metrics is NOT meant to make you feel bad about yourself, it’s simply meant to help you orient your actions towards achieving success in a way that feels good to you. 

Don’t Try to “Keep Up With The Joneses” if You Don’t Like The Joneses

Perhaps you’ve heard the idiom, “Keeping up with the Joneses” before. The phrase describes how people feel socially pressured to chase or achieve the perceived “success” that other people have, typically by comparing themselves to their neighbors or people who seem to “have it better.” 

Your Joneses might be people on your social media feeds, friends who make more money than you, or people who seem to have achieved the “next level” in their relationships or lifestyles.

But when we really think harder about what we value personally, we may not want what the Joneses have. Maybe we don’t even like the Joneses or anything they represent. So why bother with keeping up with people we don’t like or don’t admire, when we could instead spend our time and energy working towards the things that really matter to us? 

When I evaluated my own success metrics, I realized that most of the things my metaphorical “Joneses” have, I really don’t care about.

Now, instead of feeling small because I’m not “as far along” as somebody else. I’m measuring my own success based on things that are important to me. 

After redefining my success metrics, I’m measuring my success by how much I care about others and how much I live my life in integrity with my own values. And if the pursuit of cultural success ever took me away from those things, then I would be moving away from success by my own standards, not towards it.

Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live

Anne Sweeney

It is so common to feel pressure to achieve an image of success that doesn’t feel aligned with the people we want to be. So to avoid making that mistake, it’s imperative that we think about how our success metrics differ from conventional ones. That way, we strive for “success” in a way that makes us feel proud of who we are, instead of feeling small for what we’re not.

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What are your personal success metrics? Are you more personally successful than you thought you were? Leave a comment or send me a message to share your thoughts. For more uplifting content, check out some other posts on my blog, follow me on instagram @morgan_barbret, or sign up for the Self Love Atlas Newsletter!

Cheers, 

Morgan Rita Barbret