What Does Success Feel Like? 

I thought I knew what suc­cess was,  Zen12 at least for me, and that 'suc­cess' was a con­cept that was easy to define in tangi­ble, con­crete, materialistic terms.

I had done the usual self-help, busi­ness build­ing exer­cises that have you define how you know when you are suc­cess­ful, what bench­mark you use for defin­ing your suc­cess. I'm sure you know the type of ques­tions I am refer­ring to. "You know you are suc­cess­ful And like most peo­ple, I had filled in the blanks by defin­ing suc­cess in terms of the usual mea­sur­ing sticks: dol­lars earned or things bought. "I will be suc­cess­ful when I am earn­ing $250,000 a year, have com­pletely remod­eled my home, and have a new Audi or Mer­cedes sit­ting in my driveway."

While these are all really nice goals to work towards, I am begin­ning to real­ize that 'suc­cess' is not a thing that can be held and mea­sured. 'Suc­cess' in all of its immense glory - is a feeling.So rather than con­tin­u­ing to ask myself "How much money do I need in order to con­sider myself as a suc­cess?" I have begun ask­ing myself "What does suc­cess feel like?"From this per­spec­tive, suc­cess takes on a whole new iden­tity and becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more fun to pursue.When suc­cess is defined by how it feels, you don't have to wait for cir­cum­stances beyond your con­trol to hap­pen in order to feel suc­cess­ful. You don't have to wait for the money to come in, or the house to be remod­eled, or for the tim­ing to be right for you to quit your day job. You can be suc­cess­ful right here, right now, sim­ply by chang­ing the way you feel about being successful.