Member-only story

Why You Need to Define Success For Yourself

Al Dea
6 min readAug 16, 2021

--

Why your self-worth is so much more than your achievements

One of my favorite authors and thought leaders is Whitney Johnson who is the host of the Disrupt Yourself podcast. One of Whitney’s favorite questions to ask her guests is What’s a lesson that the world keeps teaching you because you can’t seem to learn it?” (Sidenote: Definitely worth reflecting on this for a few minutes today..)

My answer to this question is equating your self-worth and meaning to your achievements and accomplishments.

If you’re like me, at some point you’ve worked really hard on something that you wanted, achieved that goal, and felt a sense of emptiness after you were finished. Afterward, you set another goal, and worked toward it, achieved it, and then felt a sense of emptiness again.

For many, this is how we were raised or the cues we got from society to follow in order to be seen as successful. It’s why we chased good grades, studied harder on our standardized tests, took on extra leadership positions and worked hard to work at blue chip companies.

None of these in of themselves are bad things, and we wouldn’t be where we were if we didn’t work hard toward goals. But simply chasing titles and accomplishments does not make us fully happy. What if a bigger title, more responsibility, a…

--

--

Al Dea
Al Dea

Written by Al Dea

Leadership & Career Development Speaker & Consultant. Helping Companies & Employees Navigate Today's Workplace

No responses yet