What Means SUCCESS to YOU?

I recently posted this discussion: What means SUCCESS to you?.. on LinkedIn and am overwhelmed with the responses. My wholehearted thanks to everyone who contributed precious time to comment. Most of the people felt that you should follow your calling to be successful. They also agreed that the meaning of success changes from time to time. To my surprise, many also felt that just one thing cannot be packaged as success, it’s a combination of many factors.

Here are some of the most stimulating comments:
“I look to my expectations of myself and goals I set. I don't compare myself to others as the "yard stick" for measuring is different for each person. I try to look at myself in a 360 view, as a well balanced person (I think) needs to "be successful" in all parts of their life, not just a couple. You can't have a great career and completely blow your personal relationships, that sort of thing. I agree with you Vivek, we continually change.”

Dorothy Tannahill Moran
Life Coach

“I think the steady realization of a dream and an ideal that is driven by the heart and Passion that cannot, and will never be denied, is Success from my point of view.”

Kalpana Panwar
Management Student

“For me Success is to balance my professional as well as personal life.”
Ankita Verma
University Student

“Success to me is achieving my goals and sharing it with my world.”
Jaya Lachhwani
Healthcare Professional

“Getting what you like is Success and Liking what you get is Happiness. Success is in Big things of life and Happiness is in Little things of Life. Success is more a relative term. It depends on with whom we compare our success. I compare my present success with my past success. I'm my own Benchmark…We should try to be Successfully Happy and Happily Successful!”
Arun Davay
Corporate Trainer and Management Professor

“Success to me means Happiness, apart from the acknowledgement by family, friends, colleagues and society in general, that I have made a difference to their lives.”
Balasubramaniam M.
HR Professional

“Success to me is my inner satisfaction with the things that I do..also positive feedback that I receive for my work.”
Pankaj Choudhary
HR Professional

“Success to me is a relative term and it keeps evolving. To me success is enjoying all that i do professionally and personally. I feel and sense success when I sense the gratitude in the responses from the people whose lives I have touched…”
Neerja Singh
HR Professional

Let’s take this opportunity to share your idea of success. Waiting for your insightful comments..

Love!
Vivek

Do You Check Your Unproductive Ego?

Ayn Rand quotes in her bestseller the Fountainhead-"Man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress." And I know there are millions of Rand-fanatic across the world including me. I too agree with her, but only if the ego is used productively.

When you look around, do you notice most of the disasters are caused because of ego.. rather unproductive ego?

Joseph is a functional head with poor Excel skills. He struggles for hours to get the formulae and links right, when he has to send the monthly MIS. He can seek help of Yana, his assistant, but he doesn’t. What stops him to reach out? Ego!

Vishesh has a justification ready for everything he says. He very well knows that he is not right. Still he does it, because he can prove others wrong. How do others feel?

Laura never says sorry, despite knowing she is on the wrong side. She feels a boss is always right.

Krish never walks to his team. He rather uses intercom to call them. He has a mindset that people should visit the manager not vice versa. He’s never thought how people will feel when he reaches out to them.

Whether it is family or work, social event or a private moment always have a check on your unproductive ego. By doing this you will open new doors of opportunity and success.

To Master Change, First Dread it

I read this article on Harvard Business Review and it has given me a new perspective to change. Take time to read it.

Cheers!

Vivek

One of my favorite truisms is that change is always a threat when done to me, but it is an opportunity when done by me. Many people hate change because it is inflicted on them; someone else is making them do it. Or because circumstances are totally out of their control. (As a bumper sticker says, "One nuclear war could ruin a whole career.") On the other hand, people change all the time and love it, because they go after something they want - a new venture, a new book, a new spouse, a new baby, a new home, a new career step. In fact, when change is someone's chance to act on personal goals, it is not even called change. It is just "my project."

Tough times shift the done by me/done to me change ratio to the threatening side of loss of control, even beyond struggling industries such as autos or newspapers. Threats arouse defenses that can be paralyzing, just when action is needed. The external forces are too powerful, and the mess made by those already in place is too big for people to regain a feeling of control or find the silver linings of opportunity.

A counter-intuitive tip for mastering change is to start by wallowing in the feelings of dread it arouses. The sheer nail-biting horror of it all. Get in touch with every negative aspect, all the things that could go wrong. Then figure out a way to get that negative force on your side. In short, "Dream your worst nightmare and invest in it."

That nightmare-to-investment point comes from John Taysom, a serial entrepreneur in London who, for a glorious time in the first Internet boom, saved Reuters from being replaced by new technology. While others were whining or denying that rapid advance in Internet technologies would displace Reuters' business model, Taysom looked the beast in the face and analyzed it. He found that the worse nightmares lay in search, for one thing, as well as networking technologies, and that most of the deniers were wrong to say that new companies could never provide the security of data that Reuters offered.

He asked, in short: What will disrupt us? Who is starting to eat away at our proposition? What is emerging to replace us? And how can I make those companies and technologies our partners, befriending and joining the enemies before they destroy us?

Reuters had always commissioned small technology projects from external companies to augment internal R&D. But Taysom recognized that the contracting process, with its RFPs, was likely to get the developers' last ideas rather than their next ideas, and he wanted to go with them toward the next phase. He wanted Reuters to learn from them and make money off them as they developed, while influencing change within Reuters.

Taysom moved from London to Silicon Valley. Despite being nearly fired by Reuters early on for radical thinking, he invested in a range of promising startups, getting board or observer seats and offering new tech ventures not only cash but a Reuters customer. He led one of the first investments in Yahoo! when its founders were still living in the Stanford University dorms. The Greenhouse Fund Taysom started not only made a lot of money for Reuters, it brought rapid learning and partnerships that converted the nightmare into productive changes. Taysom's nightmare and subsequent decision to befriend the potential destroyers of his company helped push transformation. Since then, Taysom moved on, and so did Reuters, which is now part of Thomson Reuters.

This nightmare-first theory is not a pessimistic outlook on life. I examined the research on optimism and pessimism for my book Confidence. It appears that optimists are less afraid of their nightmares than pessimists. Pessimists are more likely to deny or avoid negative information. Optimists are more likely to look at the dark side, because they have the confidence to feel that they can do something about it.

So let me wish you pleasant dreams. And also productive nightmares.

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Published in Harvard Business Review