In the middle of the educator session in Madrid last Thursday, the American speaker singled me out and asked me what success was to me.
Luckily enough, before I was able to answer, somebody else answered (on my behalf), and then the conversation went elsewhere.
I thought for a few minutes about how I would answer that, but it's a standard answer for me; I've done it before in front of different people or on video, whenever the question's asked.
I reflected on that again on Saturday morning when I was walking around the field with my dogs, and I took a WhatsApp video call from my friend Chicco in Tanzania.
There's no patient confidentiality in Tanzania, so he introduced me to his patient and his nurse, and we had a quick chat on a Saturday morning while the rain was coming down about this and that and various other things, and that made me think about success too.
I then had the opportunity (and this is not a joke) to speak to someone who I consider to be one of the greatest athletes that this country has ever produced (much, much more about that later). When speaking to this woman, I understood that more than anyone, she understood what her personal success was.
Success is complex, isn't it? It's mixed up in contentment and contribution and ego and self-esteem and all sorts of different things.
It's like a fingerprint; it's entirely unique.
Then on Tuesday, for 30 minutes, I had been asked to chat to a young lad who's just started his own business.
We're connected in various different ways to various different people, and I was happy to spend a little bit of time having a coffee (he bought me a flat white) to speak to someone who was at the start of their business journey who wanted to learn from someone that they thought that was at the other end.
And so he asked me the success question, too, and I told him the answer.
Success (for me) is turning up.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
It is creating the environment that allows you to turn up with enthusiasm and a smile on your face; in doing that, in whatever it is you do, you will achieve a measure of personal success beyond that which you could have thought possible.
The reason for that is that the long term compounds over time.
You get to decide what yours is. Whatever you want it to be, but from my experience, the guys that interlink it in amongst the shiny, bright things- the money or the objects, they never quite get there.
Blog Post Number - 4712
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