First of all, let me make a few things clear about what I won’t be telling you. I won’t be giving you 10 simple steps to success. Nor will I lay out a ‘guaranteed path to success’. There are no guarantees, there are no simple steps. There is only understanding what success means to you and what sacrifices you are willing to make to achieve what you define as success.

So, first of all, let’s talk about success. Because I think this is really important.

What is success?

• the achieving of the results wanted or hoped for
• something that achieves positive results

So, success is just the desired result being achieved in any goal you set out for yourself. 

What makes a person successful? 

This is where you have to decide what you want from life. For some, this will be the hardest part of the process. From birth our little minds are filled with the expectations of others. We are fed what we should aim for and how we should live our lives. We are told what makes a person successful and a failure. But none of these expectations or definitions are correct, they are all simply other peoples ideas of what success is. And in many cases they are motivated by something other than good hearted advice. A large part of how people today, particularly millennials, define and measure success is based on social media. 

So, the first step is to strip away all the artificial constructs built up over your life of what success is, and start again.

What are the most important things in your life that have the biggest effect on your happiness?

It is so important that this is established first. How else can you work towards anything resembling success if you haven’t even established the most important things in your life?

Your success is directly correlated to these important things. How happy you make your family, how accessible the important things become and ultimately how happy you are. 

Surviving not Thriving……

Are you simply surviving, rather than thriving?

By surviving I mean, just making it from one day to the next. With no real plan for tomorrow, or next week and just getting past the next moment in time to the next. 

By thriving I mean, planning and optimising your time with the sole intention of making your life better tomorrow. While there may not be immediate obvious improvements from one day to the next, there is overtime a clear move closer towards what you define as success.

Thriving is about participating in life with joy and wonder regardless of your current financial or social status. Thriving is remembering your alive and lucky to be so, eager for the next adventure, eager to improve your experience and a love for the process of doing it. This is thriving.

I know this was probably a far shorter post than you expected, but that is because thriving is a far less complex state of being than we tell ourselves.Understand what you want out of life and you’ve cracked it.

Thriving is about planning your journey and enjoying the ride, not about the destination.