On the weekend, my football team confirmed their relegation from the Premier League, so I thought it might be nice to escape the world of unmitigated failure and focus instead, on success.
A definition of success is a difficult thing to pin down and will be something different to different people. Take my football team as an example. Success for this season was to finish 17th out of 20. To achieve that, there will have been many weeks of short term failure, but if it ultimately ended up with survival, then that would have been an overall success and most fans will have been happy (you can’t please every fan, just reading the comments section of any sports article — or worse, sports talk radio — is proof enough of that).
For the majority of the other teams in the league, finishing 17th would definitely not be a success. I can’t see Pep Guardiola popping the champagne at avoiding the drop. So I guess it’s expectations that have a huge part to play in defining and therefore achieving success.
Personally, my own definition of success has evolved throughout the different phases of my life, both personal and professional, to a point where now they have almost merged.
Early in my career, success was all about exceeding other people’s expectations and getting the next promotion or pay rise to climb the metaphorical ladder. Where was I climbing to? I didn’t really know, but I knew it should probably be in something approaching an upwardly direction.
Inevitably, as my career progressed the promotions became less frequent with each wrung of the ladder being years rather than months apart. At this point, it’s difficult for promotion to be the sole or even a primary measure of success. It’s more of a by-product. You can’t be going a couple of years without feeling successful, plus, I soon came to realise that with each promotion, all I did was begin to focus on the next one, barely taking the time to recognise and reflect on the work taken to succeed and appreciate it.
I think that my focus on individual productivity stemmed from wanting to feel the little buzz of success and achievement on a more regular basis. I may have gone a little overboard though…
…It started off with lists. Lots of lists. Specifically lists of tasks to complete for the day. Tick off all those tasks and boom, success! Not just at work but at home too. It started as soon as I woke up (or more accurately, woke up for the third time after two snoozes on the alarm). I had a list on my phone — drink water, make bed, eat fruit — tick, tick, tick. All of this on a little gamified app (more on that in a future blog) that gave a satisfying ping and motivational message when I ticked something off and showed me ever increasing streaks of success. I was a succeeding machine! I was churning out success like Spurs churn out semi-final losses. I’d been awake 10 minutes and I’d succeeded not once, not twice, but thrice!
But was this actually success? I was certainly forming some healthy (or at least harmless) habits, which I guess is a positive. But could I really consider making my bed and drinking a glass of water a success? Maybe I had set the bar a little too low.
Professionally, my focus on task driven productivity helped distract from a time where it was very difficult to deliver a traditionally successful project i.e. meeting timelines, delighting clients, that sort of thing. Yes, everything was weeks late and going wrong, but I’d ticked off 10 things from my to do list today, go me! Looking back, I think it was more of a coping mechanism than anything else. Since then, slow productivity, where you achieve something meaningful and substantial over a slightly longer time has started to appeal more to me. But I think it is completely specific to the individual.
A life focused only on long term success could be a bit of a drag. How do you keep yourself motivated if ‘success’ is so far away? I think that is where breaking large projects into phases or different deliverables comes from. It gives you and the team something to work towards that feels within relative touching distance. It’s not ‘success’ every hour/day where it almost loses all meaning, but it’s also not once every 5 years.
I’m sure you’ve all seen this quote before, from Maya Angelou, I think I saw about 5 people on LinkedIn post it in the last couple of weeks alone.
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
To be fair, I can’t really argue with it. I’ve tried. I have a natural tendency to disagree with anything popular. But this seems pretty sound.
As I’ve got older (I’m not old, I said older), I think my definition of success is getting ever closer to that quote above. The relentless pursuit of ‘the next thing’ has gradually lost it’s appeal.
I also think that quote works from a Project Management perspective too…
Are you going to feel successful if you deliver your project on time and on budget, but to do so you’ve worked 60 hour weeks and end up so exhausted that you are just a shell of who you normally are (or want to be)?
Is it a success if what you’ve delivered makes no difference to even a small part of the world, or worse, you suspect it makes it a little bit worse?
Is it a success if you’ve delivered at the expense of alienating your whole team by being a complete arse?
Maybe for some people success is success, no matter what. But it’s not for me.
Success for me is working on something that matters, having some fun doing it and having time (and energy) to focus on other things outside of work. It’s getting that work-life blend just right, which is extremely difficult to define but easy to recognise when you achieve it.
In football terms, I’m not Man City. I guess I’m more of a mid-table club, who goes on a few good cup runs and plays some exciting football whilst doing a lot of work in the community. I’m not sure which team that describes, but unfortunately it’s definitely not my team.
That’s all I’ve got.
