The Boss of You

In our book, we talk a lot about creating your own definition of success. As an entrepreneur, it’s crucial to understand your own motivations and have a clear idea of what success looks like for you — otherwise it’s not likely you’ll end up achieving it. Anyway, I was tickled this morning when I received an email newsletter from Aqualung, a.k.a. Matt Hale, who not only sings and plays beautiful music but writes a mean email. He shared his thoughts on success and I couldn’t resist sharing them here.

I’ve been doing yet more interviews and another question that keeps coming up is “what exactly IS success?” The journalists don’t actually ask that question but I have been tending to try and answer it anyway.

So what is success? Here’s a fun game:
choose which of the following outcomes would count as successful in your life:

• Wealthy and influential
• Married with 2 kids
• Ignored by everyone
• Noticed by everyone
• New ‘friend’ every weekend
• Celibate but with an enormous ding a ling
• Look like a duck
• Boring job spectacular weekends
• Boring job boring weekends
• Saving the world but bad hair
• Absolutely brilliant hair
• Decent hair
• Optician

It’s been proven (by science) that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has a different definition of success. Yet THE WORLD sets out a few narrow presciptive parameters and says everything outside them is FAILURE and WRONG and STUPID. Yeah!

I am not, by the usual measures, a particularly successful musician. I can’t fill a stadium anywhere. (even my gig at the Catford Mouse-Stadium was only half full) my albums refuse to go to no.1 and i’ve been dropped more times than a monkeys’ yo-yo.

But I am doing what I love with people I love and some people in the world love what we do. And i’m happy more often than i’m sad. There we are then.