Are You Here To Be A Successful Author? 157If you could give advice to those who are still searching for their
life’s purpose, what would it be?
Stop and think how you define success in your life? Personally. Not a
politically correct answer and not the answer that you’re supposed to
give your boss. We did a worldwide success survey with people who
have had a big impact in their field for at least twenty years or more.
What we found that was universal among all of them was that there are
three essential dimensions to the definition of success.
The first, as I stated above, is doing something that really mattered
to them. Usually we get sidetracked. For instance, I was talking to Warren
Buffet, one of the world’s greatest living investors and one of the world’s
richest people, and he said that people come to him all the time asking
him for career advice. They’ll say they’ve found a core business that
they want to do, and maybe have an action plan, but the passion is often
missing from their plan. They say, “I’ll do this because it’s the right
thing to do for a few years, then I’ll get back to doing something that I
really love.” Then two, three, or five years will pass, and they’ll check in
again and they’ll discover that they’re still not doing what they’re
passionate about. “I’ll do that in my next job,” they’ll say, “Or maybe in
my next company or with my next promotion.”
Warren said, “Mark, living your life always putting your passion
off until later is like saving up sex for old age. It’s a really bad idea.”
What we found is that it’s not just something that gives you less enjoyment
in your life, it’s the one thing that makes the difference between those
people who have an average experience in life and those who are able to
contribute greatly to a career or profession for a long period of time.
They found some higher purpose, something that really mattered
to them, and they care about having an impact on other people. Then
they found a way to pull all of that together by creating goals and
objectives to accomplish it.
It was all about purpose, passion, and a sense of performance
(being able to get things done). I wish I had learned that earlier in life.
Anyone who’s even thinking about making a run at a successful career
should abandon being advised, in a sense, by other people. No one can
tell you what matters to you and what your core passion should be. They
can help you in the process of putting your goals together or learning
how to achieve goals, and that’s a really important skill. But those other
two pieces were really important to those successful people. The outcome
was sometimes money, fame, power or traditional success, but it never