Don’t let anyone define success for you.  Your success is yours alone to define.  The problem with most of us is that we don’t know what success looks like for “me”.  If we don’t take the time to nail down definitively what success means, how will we ever know if we’ve achieved it or not?

Don’t panic if your current definition of success is to just make the bills this month, or to not consume sodas and snacks today.  We each grow from success to success, and small successes multiply like rabbits into bigger ones.  Start small and build momentum, leaping forward from one success to the next, and then rinse and repeat.

I like to use Michael Phelps as an example of this concept.  The first time he went to the Olympics in 2000, he won exactly zero medals.  He was, however, the youngest male to ever make the U.S. Olympic Swim Team at age 15.  He was successful.  Can you imagine Michael Phelps going to the Olympics and NOT winning a medal and being considered a success? For him, that first go-round, just making the team was his definition of success.

He built on that success, and leapt to his next personally defined success of actually winning medals, a lot of them, 6 Gold and 2 Bronze, in the 2004 Olympics.  Not a bad swim meet, by any standards, but Michael, having reached that level of success, launched himself to attempt the highest level of success ever by any Olympic Champion.  If you watched the 2008 Olympics, you saw Michael and his coach huddled over that slip of paper, which defined Michael’s success.  Anything short of the record breaking 8 Gold Medals would have been a failure, not for anyone else in the history of the games, but for Michael personally.

Define your success, start small and build on it.  Ever-increasing success, from one victory to another, from goal to goal, dream to dream, vision to vision.  You never start out with a record breaking performance, you have to get there the same way Michael did.  Years and years of building on small successes. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Boo Yah!!