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How can you tell if your life is a success or not? Would a 10 year old ‘you’ look at you today and say you were successful? This exercise explores the definition of success, but the definition of success as we see it in ourselves. It forces us to define what success is to us, and then hold ourselves up to account for where we are.

Success as defined in the dictionary is just the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. So I ask myself, have I reached my aim or purpose? This can get broad and vague. How do we measure our lives as success? It is much easier to break things down into different pillars of life. Financial, Relational, Physical, and Spiritual.

How do we know if we have a successful life financially? This is much easier to answer. Is your bank account where you want it to be? Do you have a job/career that is providing you what you envisioned? If not, you do not have a successful life financially according to the very definition of success. Usually we have a very clear idea of what we want to earn and how we want to be set financially, but when we are forced to look at how we are performing, we end up seeing our own failures. Rohit said something that is very true. Our priorities are out of touch. If we have no choice we will find a way to make our financial needs happen.

If our finances are not successful, it is time to look into why. Look through your expenses. Write down every single expense you have for an entire month. Then separate them all into 2 categories; Needs and Wants. Put items that are necessary for your survival into the Needs Category, and everything else into the Wants Category. If you truly want to be a success, you will be able to see what you need to cut out to save more and build your finances up. You can also look at your career and see if you are on the right path or if changes are needed. Is your career helping you reach your goals? If not, how can you more align it with your goals?

Apply the same level of analysis to the other 3 pillars in your life and make the necessary adjustments. From there it will be easier to see where we are holding ourselves back from reaching our goals. We find that our excuses really don’t hold weight when we dig this deep. We are responsible for our outcome and no external force is responsible for our decisions.

It isn’t an easy thing to do when we look this deep at our level of success. However, if we truly want to reach our goals and be a success, we need to be able to look at our goals and our efforts to determine if we are where we want to be. Only then will we be able to make the necessary changes to get us to where we want to be.