How to Define Success for Yourself Before You Chase Someone Else’s

To define success for yourself, strip out every goal you borrowed from someone else, then ask what you actually want the money, the title or the attention to give you. Usually it’s freedom, security, significance or power, and some of that doesn’t need a bank balance at all. Write your own version down, then check that you’re ready, willing and able to go after it.

I gave the talk above when I was 29, with no notes and no structure. People always asked me for the techniques and the hacks. Here’s what I told that room instead. “A lot of people see the glory, but they don’t actually see the story.” The website, the movies, the magazine covers are just the highlight reel. The lessons are in the hard yards before any of that, and a lot of mine came from chasing success that wasn’t mine.

Before my story, I asked the room how old they were when they first fell in love with self-development. One man said four. He’d sat on the porch of his great-grandmother’s school teacher, a woman born a slave, and she told him nothing could stop him. It didn’t come from a book. It came from one person who meant it.

Why you keep chasing someone else’s definition of success

The line I want you to take from that speech is this: stop chasing unicorns, AKA somebody else’s definition of success.

For years I put successful people on a pedestal because I hadn’t developed my own story yet. When you don’t know what you want, you grab the nearest picture of success and run at it.

The people you admire are great. But ask the better question: where does that greatness lie in them, and where does it lie in you? Go for that. Whatever you call it (your personal definition of success, what success means to you), it has to come from inside, or you’ll get there and feel nothing.

The glory vs the story: how I got it wrong first

My story starts at about seven years old with Space Jam. I got my mum to buy me a plastic six-foot ring and jumped off bricks to dunk on it. I told her I wanted to be like Michael Jordan. She told me I could be Joel. She handed me Michael Jordan’s Rare Air, my first exposure to training your mind and surrounding yourself with people better than you.

She also gave me a book called 50 Ways to Make Pocket Money. I tried about 20 of them. The one that hit: I earned $50 working for the next-door neighbor over the holidays, spent it on Toblerone bars and mint patties, and knocked on doors selling them back to the neighbors at double the price. I think they felt sorry for me. Then I put the profit into limited-edition NBA cards and traded them at school. I didn’t feel like I had limits.

Then I hit year eight, still 12, and Mum started saying the same thing every morning when I jumped out of the car: “Take a risk. Try something different.” So that year I punched someone out for messing with my mates, let off a flamethrower in the middle of science class and stole chocolates from the grocery store across the road and got arrested. She pulled me aside and explained that wasn’t the kind of risk she meant.

Her next move was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. A lot of it went over my head at 12, but two ideas stuck. A nine-to-five job is less stable than it looks, because you can lose it and the economy can crash. And you don’t have to work for money, you can make money work for you.

I got the dream job and felt empty

As a teenager I went all in on hip-hop. I knocked on a radio station’s door week after week until they let me intern for free. Then I told American record labels I could get their music played on one of Australia’s biggest hip-hop and R&B stations. I couldn’t, really. But the exclusives arrived, and eventually the station manager gave me my own midnight show. It took off. I interviewed big artists, shopped beats from producer friends, and at about 20 I scored a record deal with Atlantic Records and moved to Miami.

That was the glory. Within about two years I was waking up every day feeling empty. I had no control. That line about making money work for you kept coming back, so I walked away, and my friends and family thought I’d lost it.

Flying home to Perth, I missed my connection and ended up in a San Francisco motel at 2 a.m., asking myself if I’d made the right decision. A Tony Robbins infomercial was on the TV. I went home, got into his books, put them down because I wasn’t ready yet, and took a sales job because I was driven by money.

The CEO brought in Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, who by then was teaching sales the ethical way. In a workshop he challenged me to write down my vision for success, my strengths, my passions and the solution I was bringing to the world, then read it out in front of everyone. My answer: I love self-development and I’m good with computers, so I could share inspiring ideas with the world. That’s how Addicted2Success started.

Freedom, not money: the desert job that showed me the difference

I got Ds and Fs in high school English, so I believed I couldn’t write. Then my first article for the site went viral. So did the next one. People didn’t want a research paper. They wanted it straight and simple.

Money was still my motivation, though. I took a job up north in the Australian desert with an environmental team clearing land for Chevron, catching snakes, lizards and kangaroos in heat I remember as about 132 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 28 days on, a week off, and a lot of negative people around me. So I’d jump in the car and play Tony Robbins tapes to unplug from it. His message was that when your back’s against the wall, you burn the boats. There’s no other option.

I doubled my content and started networking. In about three months back then, the site jumped from around 400,000 views to over a million, and I was making about $6,000 a month from advertising. Then I walked in and fired my boss.

Here’s the part that matters. Driving home that day, I booked a trip to Italy. I’d never been to Europe. And it hit me: “I was looking for freedom, not money itself.”

Get out of the paper prison

A lot of people are in what I call the paper prison. They’re trapped in the idea of why they need money, and they’ve never asked how they actually value it. Some people want money for significance. Some want power. Some want security. Some want freedom. What they don’t realize is they can find some of those things without the physical money itself.

This isn’t a wealth-building lesson. If you want that side, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. This is about your definition of success. If what you really want is freedom, then a job that pays more but owns every hour of your week isn’t success, no matter how it looks on paper. Name what the money is standing in for, then look for the most direct way to get that thing.

Commit long enough for the truth to show up

About three years in, the site had reached around 40 million views worldwide and over 2 million followers on social media, and I got to interview Tony Robbins. I asked him how the real people stand apart from the flood of coaches, bloggers and YouTubers. As I remember it, he said the cream rises to the top. A lot of people aren’t willing to master, they dabble. Even if you work slowly, if you commit to something for ten years minimum, you’ll be the one who hung in there and the one who gets remembered.

Then I asked what we could actually act on. His answer, as I recall it, was that the biggest advantage you can have in business and in life is truth, and the only way to get truth is through experience. You have to get your hands dirty.

I was a guy behind a blog doing little podcast interviews, so I had to ask myself if I was really getting my hands dirty. I started stretching. Not so much that I’d snap, but enough to grow. I jumped in front of a camera. At first it took a bunch of takes. Now it’s one take. That’s why I’m blunt about people being addicted to information instead of execution. You can’t read your way into your own definition of success. You have to test it.

Ready, willing and able: the three zones of excellence

After interviewing hundreds of successful people, I kept looking for the pattern under what they said. I boiled it down to three zones of excellence:

• Beliefs (ready). Your mindset, and knowing the direction you’re going in.
• Habits (willing). The daily energy bolts of action. Fifty swings at a big tree in one day won’t knock it down. Swing at it every day and eventually it falls.
• Skills (able). Mechanical skills, like learning Photoshop or speaking better, and emotional skills, like how you communicate with people.

You can’t skip one. Imagine you’re ready and willing to be a doctor, and someone comes in who needs a leg amputated a certain way. You’ve got a chainsaw and no skill. You’re going to make a mess. When a client tells me they can’t make something happen, I run the three zones and we can usually pinpoint it. Usually it’s the habits or the mindset they haven’t followed through on.

Turn up the volume on the whispers of wisdom

Looking back from seven years old to 29, my purpose kept giving me little nudges. The books. Tony on a motel TV. Jordan Belfort making me write it down. I call them whispers of wisdom. My friend Peta Kelly calls it the quiet tap on the shoulder. I fought them for years because I thought I knew best.

Everyone has heard them. Some of you just have the volume turned down. Crank it up.

The Christian speaker Myles Munroe, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2014, made a point I love. A manufacturer doesn’t build a product and then say, let’s see what it’s for. The purpose comes first. The way I heard it, God made us the same way, with a purpose already inside us. Your job is to keep listening for it.

The one-week-to-live test

I live up in the mountains in Santa Barbara, and in the mornings my friend Joe and I stand on the balcony and practice our gratitudes. Gratitude, meditation and networking are the habits I’ve seen come up again and again with the people I interview. One morning, out of nowhere, Joe asked me: if you had one week to live, what would you do?

Nobody had ever asked me that. I told him I’d spend 24 hours with someone filming me, spilling out everything I know for anyone to use, kind of like Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I’d been offered millions for Addicted2Success at that point, but if nobody would pay that on the day, I’d sell it for something like $500,000 and fly my friends from around the world to the southwest coast of Australia for a final party on a big boat.

Joe said, “Isn’t that interesting?” All the things I was doing to make more money and build the business didn’t matter in my final days. “You’re not going for the money, are you?” Then he asked how I could start operating from that place a little more. Not fully, because that would be irresponsible. Just more.

That’s the best tool I’ve found to define success for yourself. Answer Joe’s question honestly and you’ll see which goals you borrowed.

How to define success for yourself in 5 steps

1. Answer the one-week question. Write what you’d do with seven days left. That list is closer to your real definition of success than your vision board.
2. Name what money is standing in for. Significance, power, security or freedom. Then find a way to get some of it now, without waiting for a number.
3. Audit your unicorns. List the people whose lives you’re chasing. For each one, write the greatness you see in them and where that same thing lives in you.
4. Check ready, willing and able. Is your belief there? Are your daily habits there? Do you have the mechanical and emotional skills? Fix the weakest zone first.
5. Commit and stretch. Pick a timeline long enough for truth to show up, think years rather than weeks, and stretch enough to grow without snapping.

It would be a damn shame to die without giving the world your unique gifts and your unique greatness. Stop chasing the glory you saw on someone else’s page, and start writing your own story.

FAQ

How do you define success for yourself?

Remove the goals you borrowed from other people, then ask what you want money, status or attention to give you. Write that down in your own words. Test it with one question: if you had one week to live, would you still want it?

What does it mean to chase someone else’s definition of success?

It means copying another person’s goals, lifestyle or numbers without knowing whether they fit you. I call it chasing unicorns. You can admire someone, but look for where their greatness also lives in you and build from that instead.

What is the paper prison?

The paper prison is being trapped by your need for money without knowing what you value it for. People usually want significance, power, security or freedom. Some of those can be found without the physical money itself, which changes what success looks like.

What are the three zones of excellence?

Beliefs, habits and skills, or ready, willing and able. Beliefs give you direction, habits are the daily action, and skills are both mechanical and emotional. You need all three. Being ready and willing with no skill still makes a mess.

Is it wrong to define success by money?

No, but money is usually a stand-in for something else. When I fired my boss and booked a trip to Italy, I realized I’d been chasing freedom, not money itself. Name the feeling you want, and you’ll make better decisions about how to get it.