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Articles filed in: Success

January 27, 2014

Success Is How Your Customers Feel

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You’ve just had a great launch. You made your monthly sales targets. Your stock sold out in one day. There are a hundred and one reasons to celebrate, and one thing to remember.

Success is not just a data point that you hit on the sales chart, or a dollar figure that makes your accountant happy.
Success is how your customers feel.

How are you measuring that?

Image by Ed Yourdon.

April 26, 2012

Why You Need To Change How You Think About Success

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From the outside looking in success looks so easy. Successful people make it all look a bit like falling off a log. It’s easy to think that success happens in the moment, or is catalysed by one major event. Like being stranded while travelling, deciding to charter a flight and then selling tickets to other passengers by scrawling the details on a blackboard. Eureka!

In reality success doesn’t happen like this. The opportunities you’ve created didn’t just fall in your lap. They are not the result of one giant leap, but the product of a million tiny decisions you’ve been making every day for years.

It’s the small choices that define us,
not the momentous one off decisions

Danielle didn’t begin building her multi-layered business on the day she launched her website. She was laying those foundations long before she ever came up Fire Starter Sessions. And although it’s a great story, Richard Branson was exercising his entrepreneurial muscle long before he chartered that flight.

Success, like washboard abs, is a habit. The daily practice of making small choices that add up in the end. It’s about doing what you said you’d do, even though nobody but you will notice and knowing in your gut why that matters.

Image by Rattlesnake Jake.

October 11, 2011

Being Successful Isn’t About What You Do

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Why is it that we’ve all got heroes that many of us haven’t ever met? If heroes are just ordinary people who do something extraordinary, how can they be so ubiquitous and uncommon all at once? I think this video goes part of the way to answering that question.

That was you when you were four. What on earth happened?

For a start you learned that you weren’t superhuman, that you couldn’t really fly and jumping off walls might actually hurt. You learned that you made mistakes and that sometimes people would laugh at you. You learned to be careful about what you said, not to stand out, to fit in. Most importantly though you learned to stop believing in yourself.

Then you grew up and you learned to worry about the important things in life like; Does my bum look big in this? And how many friend requests have I got on Facebook today? You learned how to put your best face forward. And you were saved by the greatest invention known to every the lost hero. The delete key! You might not be a hero anymore, but you could be ‘super’.

You know we’ve got this notion that we’re inspired by the extraordinary stuff that we see happening around us. We’re so focused on the ‘big what’, that we’ve lost sight of the truth about what really inspires people.

Being successful isn’t about what you do, it’s about how you do it.

Heroes touch us by being masters of how. Seth Godin shows us how to inspire. Bono shows us how to be passionate. Richard Branson shows us how to believe in our dreams. And Steve Jobs showed us how to live before we die. You see real heroes aren’t always out there doing extraordinary things every day. They’re often doing stuff you and I could do, if we chose to.

Every Person you impact you leave a heart-print, or not,
and that is your legacy. ~ Oprah

I’d like to propose a new definition of the modern hero. A hero is an extraordinary person doing ordinary things. You have the potential to reach out to people every day and how you do that is what makes your ideas matter.

Image by Charles Van Den Broek.