001: Am I Successful? Business Bumpers.

THE AMBIGUOUS NATURE OF “SUCCESS” It’s a lot like the concept of a “victory” in the sense that you can “win” the game and still lose everything that actually matters to you. I was recently asked, on a podcast, what the biggest mistake young business owners make. The response was along the lines of: “We never define what we want our LIVES to look like. We talk about revenue numbers. We talk about business size. We talk about people served. But we never talk about what our lives look like. Are we home in time for dinner? Do we travel with out family? Do our kids even see us? And this isn’t an accident. We do it because once we define what success looks like to us, in term of our lives, we have also done something else: We’ve defined failure. No longer can we hide behind revenue numbers, acquisitions, big deals, and all the BS trappings. Once we define what we want our lives to look like we can’t make up “successes”. Which is exactly why we need to do it. Because until we define success, we will find 100 ways to win a bunch of petty victories that, at the end of it all, mean nothing.” That’s why I wrote bumpers. That’s why I spend so much time with our clients figuring out what they want THEIR LIFE to look like. Revenue numbers are a cop out. Selling more stuff is easy. Hitting your revenue numbers AND facilitating the life you want should be the real goal. It’s REALLY easy to find a race you can win. But most of them have nothing to do with what you actually want out of life.