In recent days I learned that a family-run business I grew up with experienced some overnight teenage trouble (captured on security cameras). The young people stole, damaged property and caused issues for the people who not only run a business on that property but live there. I’m connected with some of the family on social media and they shared their hurt as well as asked for support from the community in response to these events. Of course I was upset reading about this because their business is definitely an institution in the area and it hurts as a fellow business owner that people would do this to something that you work so hard on.
As I reflected on these feelings, I was reminded of how personal success should be. It should be something we’re invested in, it should mean something to us, we should be passionate about it, and there should be purpose behind it. In this day and age there’s no reason why you shouldn’t choose a job or build a business around something that matters to you. There are so many things that can and do go wrong in our lives, so many things that challenge us, so many changes we have to work through, so much growing to do, that it is almost illogical how many barriers we put between both our success and happiness.
Directly connected to being invested in your own success, we also have to do better about respecting and recognizing that others are invested in and work hard for and are passionate about their work. We should take care with the things that make up other people’s success, and remember that a fellow human is trying to earn a living as well. We don’t have to have the same passion or level of interest that they do (even though we greatly benefit when they are that invested in their success), we just have to understand that they have a personal stake in their success journey, just like we do in ours.
If success isn’t personal for you anymore, if the work you’re doing has lost value or you’ve lost sight of what you were investing in and why, it’s a good reminder to dig into that, and there’s no better time than this virus pandemic that has upset much of our world and encouraged us to rethink so much of how we’ve lived and the decisions we’ve made. What’s your ‘why’ to your success?