Defining Success

Success is important to me. At times it's not so much the result, but rather knowing that I'm not wasting my life in a generic and average way. In the past when I have felt unproductive, I'd step up the pace only long enough to be getting somewhere. After attaining my desire to feel fulfilled, I would stop working and repeat the process over and over, getting virtually nowhere. In my desire to live a fulfilling life, weeks would pass where I knew that I was simply wasting my time. Maybe it's the hacker in me, but I find it immoral, for myself, to live without getting anywhere. Simply being alive in and of itself is amazing. It would be a shame for me to waste my life without doing anything with it. With my lethargic default nature and mentality of life, I knew that I would have to make a change. If you find yourself in a similar situation, the only requirement to start getting out is a desire for success.

A great way to turn a desire for success into results is to create weekly to-do lists. Simply write out all the tasks, including check boxes for each, of what you would need to accomplish in the week to consider yourself successful. You can add tasks based on chunks of time or completion. The idea is to divide your weekly goals into units that are just a bit harder than what you are comfortable with. Make each task require some effort but not so much that you get discouraged and quit.

Be careful not to include too many tasks at first as your list may take more effort to complete than you had originally anticipated. Just start with a few tasks and build momentum by completing every single one in the allotted week. Seeing everything become checked off is a great way to build excitement and put all the more effort into next week's list. Add more difficult tasks to next week's check-list until you fail to complete everything for the given week. Then add a few less for the week after. The idea is to fail half of the time and succeed the other half. Failure means that you are attempting things outside of your abilities and success means you are achieving your goals of what's important to you.

An alternative of to-do lists is to schedule your time. I find that scheduling all of my time instead of using to-do lists didn't work as well for myself because things change. For example, I may plan at the beginning of the week to spend two hours during an evening to write program code. This would be done without knowing my situation during that evening so if something comes up, such as an assignment deadline or my boss asks me to work extra, I would find it much harder, if not impossible, to complete my goal. Alternatively, a to-do list offers a greater sense of control as one can choose when to complete a certain task at times when more information about other obligations and new plans is available.

Life is said to be a journey. I believe this and think that it's not where you end up, it's what you did with your time on the way there that counts for the most. People can always look at where they are in life and see ways to improve. It becomes very hard to declare one's self successful if something could have been done better. I propose a more genuine approach is making the most of one's time. Writing to-do lists does just that!