It’s that time of year again—resolution time. I have never succeeded with resolutions, so I abandoned them years ago.
I like what Daniel does with words for the year. (See his newsletter, Reconcile, for his first word of 2024 and how he adopted this practice.)
However, while I write a lot, three words don’t quite seem to fit me and my goals for a year. Somehow, I need to give myself more context.
Instead of resolutions based on actions or words based on guiding ideas, I’m going to consider an alternative this year: Rethinking how I choose to measure success.
Too many of us choose to measure success based on other people’s actions or reactions. For example, too many writers think they need to sell x number of copies of a book for that book to succeed. But very few of our actions lead to other people buying our books. Why create a measure of success that depends on other people’s actions?
I need measures I can control to create my success.
Measures I Can Control
As long as we measure our actions, we can control our measures and successes. Here are several measures I can control:
- When, what, and how much I eat. While that’s supposed to show me changes in my weight or muscle, I find that there are many interactions between my choices and delays between my choices and the results.
- My word count. I’m a writer, so I count words. Other writers count projects, but that’s too big for me. (I write clean, so I don’t need a lot of rewriting or editing to finish any given piece. I can count words and know they are the building blocks of my output.)
- The number of experiments for my business. I have a ton of ideas for more books, workshops, you name it. I will need to experiment to make sure I achieve some useful business result. Since these are experiments, I don’t expect success right away—or, sometimes ever. Every experiment is a chance to learn first. And second, to practice my adaptability and resilience.
All of these measures are under my control. That’s why I can use them to measure success.
What Does Success Mean to You?
Since my measures are under my control, so are my successes and failures. I’m not going to choose the example of weight, because of those long feedback loops. But, let’s discuss writing.
In my consulting, I advocate for teams finishing something small every day and releasing that thing. It’s almost the same in my writing. Because I write clean, even if that “only” means I finish a paragraph because I have five minutes, I know that writing is done. That piece of writing might not fit into a larger piece, such as an article or a chapter, but that’s fine. I can make it work in a blog post.
That’s why finishing something every day works so well for me, and is one of my success measures.
And because I use the idea of the number of experiments, maybe I can learn to finish something small, get it out there, and see how people react. Their reactions help me learn if this offering is more or less useful right now. (And since I suspect my next nonfiction book is about continual planning, my experiments can help me write the book. Hehehe.)
My success depends on measures I can control—and my measures help me manage my successes. A win-win for me.
That’s the question this week: How do you choose to measure success?