DEFINE YOUR SUCCESS

This is the beginning of anything you want ...

— ANONYMOUS

Our earliest ideas of success come from others. It starts at home with what our parents and family think and then continues at school and work with what behaviors our teachers and bosses reward. We respond to these early influences by internalizing the versions of success we see around us. If we let them, these external versions of success can overwhelm our own visions, causing us to follow the well-worn path to a life that we might not want to live.

Brenna was leading a typical life of an MBA student. She was in her third year working at a Fortune 500 company in a job that made her feel trapped. She enrolled in the MBA program even though she preferred on-the-job learning to the classroom. And she was living at home with her parents in the suburbs, which she found dull, in order to pay down her student loans. She was pursuing a path based on external markers of success rather than her own vision and goals.

Brenna was my student, and after finishing my course (which was the first in her MBA program), she quit her job, dropped out of the MBA program, and moved into the city. When I caught up with her about a year later, she was working for a well-funded startup in a challenging role that aligned with her long-term interests, she was enjoying the convenience and ease of urban living, and she was engaged to be married. She still had not re-enrolled in the MBA program and wasn't sure if she ever would. Brenna had stopped living the life others expected her to and started following her own interests and desires. She created her own vision of her success.

If we don't take the time to reflect on what success means to us and what our version of it is, we can all too easily fall into living a life based on the priorities of others: how much time our boss thinks we should spend in the office, what our parents want us to study, and what career will impress our friends. If we haven't taken the time to reflect and be intentional about our priorities, we risk making decisions that deviate from what we truly want. We end up taking that lucrative job that requires a ton of travel when what we really want is time to connect and contribute to our family and friends at home. We work too much and too long, even though we say we want to prioritize raising our kids, training for the marathon, or hanging out with our aging parents.

To define success for ourselves, we must turn away from the external and cultural versions of success around us. Only when we quiet the peer, parental, academic, corporate, and social voices telling us what we "should" want and what we're "supposed" to do can we listen for our own internal desires and dreams. And only by listening carefully can we start to see what our version of success looks like.

Jessica Fox, a former storyteller at NASA and author of Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets, recommends a process that she uses to tap into her own thoughts and dreams called "playtime" (she reveals the interesting outcomes of this process in her book). She describes playtime like this:

There should be a time of day, every day, when you're alone, when you put your phone down and, to quote my favorite author, Joseph Campbell, "simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be." How you do that doesn't matter. You can just sit there and stare out a window, you can sketch, or you can see what images or words come up, and write them down. The point is simply to get in touch with your own thoughts. Something within that mire of ideas that comes out will be a seed or a germ that's incredibly important to you, that you wouldn't have had time to listen to unless you did this kind of exercise. Or something will come forth that's been in you but you're not listening to it. Sometimes you'll notice a pattern, something coming up over and over again. Pay attention to that. There's no need to create anything out of this, this is a time of creative incubation. You just see what happens.

Try taking some playtime, and then completing the exercise below.

The New American Dream

Our American version of success has historically been tied to our vision of the American Dream: the house, the car, the 2.3 kids, and the leisurely retirement at the end. Yet there's some evidence that this image is changing. MetLife conducted 1,000 interviews for its Study of the American Dream and concluded, "Americans are less concerned with material issues, and that life's traditional markers of success — getting married, buying a house, having a family, building wealth — do not matter as much today. Rather, achieving a sense of personal fulfillment is more important toward realizing the American Dream than accumulating material wealth."

The Center for a New American Dream survey of nearly 2,000 Americans reached a similar conclusion. Their respondents named personal freedom, security, achieving personal potential, and having free time to enjoy life as their top answers to the question of what their particular version of the American Dream looked like. We're seeing a new version of success taking hold that is more focused on personal priorities. It's less about square feet in our home(s), the car(s) in the driveway, and dollar(s) in the bank and more about experiences, relationships, and personal fulfillment.

Research on what leads to a happy and meaningful life suggests that modifying the traditional American Dream to focus more internally and on personal fulfillment is a step in the right direction. Tim Kasser, a professor and the author of The High Price of Materialism, analyzed a decade of empirical data on materialism and its effect on our well-being. His research shows that focusing our lives on material pursuits breeds anxiety, isolation, and alienation. He found that placing a high value on material goods is associated with insecurity and lower levels of social and empathetic behavior. His research results suggest that organizing a life around our intrinsic values is the best way to increase our sense of well-being.

The emergence of "digital nomads" is one example of this new, less-materialistic version of success. Digital nomads use technology to work, live, play, and travel when they want, from where they want. Freed from commuting, cubicles, the suburbs, and the status quo, they build geographically flexible lives around the places they want to be. It's the antithesis of the traditional life centered on an office building, a mortgage, and a...