What is success to you? A lot of times, people have a definition that you can tell, it's not their definition. Success is being a millionaire, having three million dollars in their bank account, making a million dollars with their business, having a big house, and having fancy cars.
Success, what people say, is things. But what I have learned over the last year, interviewing countless entrepreneurs around the world, especially e-mail entrepreneurs, who are building their empires for EmpiHER® TV on the Notoriety® Network, is that many times, females don't define success. We don't define success overall, and we don't define it with money.
Most female entrepreneurs define success as hitting marks of contribution, giving back, or community, or they don't have a definition of success. And when pushed about why they don't have a definition of success, it's almost as if, if they define it, they won't get it.
Now, if we can't define success or ourselves individually, we never know when we're getting close to it, meaning our workload and our job never get done. Honestly, I think that's half of why a lot of female entrepreneurs don't define success. They don't ever want their job done.
But, as Type A personalities that most of us are, when we don't have a clear definition, a clear target of what success is to us, we will work ourselves to death, and I mean that literally. We will work, never thinking we have achieved, never thinking that we've been enough, done enough, or good enough.
By defining success for ourselves, it doesn't mean that we stop our jobs when we get there. It doesn't mean the race is won. It means what we're doing is what we truly want to do. Defining success and knowing what the markers are for us become checkmarks along the road of life to say, "Keep going on. You're succeeding with what you want to succeed with." Or, "Pause for a moment because somehow, we're on the wrong track all of a sudden."
What is success for you? It doesn't have to be money, but it does have to be what is valuable to you. Most important to you, your heart, and in turn, what you want your life to be about. When you define success for yourself, you will be able to see success more often in your everyday life.