If you want success on your own terms, you have to define your terms.

"Defaulting" is what we call what happens when you don't make a move in your favor...the situation either stays the same, or it shifts to the most likely outcome to happen without your influence. You don't get to have a say anymore even if you are affected, because you didn't speak up when you had the opportunity. This goes for action too, not just words.

This is another facet to knowing exactly what you want. If you are clueless about what you truly desire in your life, if you don't know what you want, you'll take what you can get...again, you land in the default zone. You didn't know any better, or maybe couldn't have cared less at the time. You drifted, went with the flow or followed the status quo. You followed the rules. So, take a look at where you are now. Assess your life.

Are you satisfied with what you're doing with your time? Are you content in the life you have? Are you enjoying the security that you envisioned for yourself? Are those visions actually yours?

Success on someone else's terms are their kind of success, not yours. As a kid you may believe they are yours because those standards are what you grew up with, and measured yourself against. Since you grew up with these standards, they're normal to you. They become your default standards -- but sooner or later, living by default standards can get wearing. Teenage rebellion is only the tip of the iceberg, but it's a very honest example. As an adult, you can take the initiative to test things for yourself and find out what you can do, find out which standards you can truly claim as your own....and you can say it's because you're trying to find out who you are and what you stand for.

For example, which of the following means "success" to you?

Remember how sharp and hyper-real the world looks like when you're anticipating something?

• Getting up very early on Christmas morning.
• Haunting the mailbox (or the side-table beside the front door) for your acceptance letter from college.
• The last few minutes before you're called in for the final interview.
• 5 minutes before you meet the person you've been corresponding with through Skype and e-mail for the past 6 months.
• The moment the door opens to your first exhibit, and the first guests arrive.
  

You're antsy. You can't be still. You're screamingly awake --internally, at least-- and your thoughts are going a hundred miles an hour. What's going to happen next? What do you do if you get what you want? What do you do if you don't? What do you do? It feels like you're going to vibrate out of your skin, you're so dizzy.

What about these situations?

• You're behind on your credit cards. Way behind, and every time the phone rings you train yourself to ignore it. The creditors won't get anything anyway, it would only be a waste of time. Then there's a knock on the door.
  
• It's the week before finals, and it seems the whole student population is at the library. All the tables are filled, and the snafu with the books you reserved can't be fixed, the books just aren't there anymore. Sorry.
  
• The numbers have been steadily dropping in the past month, and more customers are opting out of your latest marketing strategy's sign-up plan.
• Too much month, not enough money. You have a gap of four days before your next paycheck comes in, and it might as well be two weeks.

A while back we posted the following entries:

• Free Classes Online! (Or, Rethinking Education) - "Hard times do ease up, however, and while you can't predict the future, you still decide your own fate. You do what you can to keep going, and if that means going for more education, you still have options."
  
• Taking Action (Rethinking Education 2) -  "There's no time better than the present to train yourself to being flexible and open to change. This is something you have to teach yourself, and no course or college can give it to you."

While these articles touched on the various choices available today for people looking to continue their education, today's discussion touches on a different aspect of the issue:

• One, what does it mean "to be educated"?
• And two, what will it mean to educate yourself?

What does it mean, to be "educated"?
This is a very old question, and one which has been hotly debated by the great minds of history, but for today,  What Must An Educated Person Know? (The Personal MBA) is an excellent staring point. Usually when people talk about "getting an education", they're talking about college, when in fact college is an institution that facilitates education but isn't a guarantee of it (face it, we've met people with very nice degrees who can't handle PowerPoint, or exhibit common street-sense). In the article, things like majors, extra-curriculars and internships aren't even even touched on. According to Joshua Kaufman, being educated is all about skills acquisition and practice.

Let's start with something simple: There is something you want. You really really really want this something.  This something may be an object, an event or a condition. For example: it may be a better job, a promotion, or better health.

Now: what are you doing to get it, or make it happen?

The gap between "wanting" and "having" is filled with taking action. You know about pipe dreams and castles in the air, but if you don't act, you resign yourself to wanting from afar. If pining away is your thing, no one's stopping you. But if pining is not your thing, then you're the biggest factor in the way of getting what you want.

You want this, what do you do get it? A lot of that. The trick -- which isn't a short-cut or a trick at all -- is to break down the lot of THAT into smaller to-do's, then little just-did's. That's how success sneaks in -- it disguises itself as hard work. Another component to success is clarity: you have to be clear about what you really want, because if you're vague about your desires, 1) how will you know if you've already got what you want? and 2) how sure are you that it's what you really want? (Maybe it's a substitute for something else?)


You want. So?

Status quo :

"Status quo" is a different animal from "comfort zone", although it's very easy to take one for the other. You both get used to them, and they can help make you feel safe and stable. Just as you know the boundaries of your comfort zones, you know what keeps the status quo, and in both case your general approach is usually this:  Don't rock the boat. Just keep quo-ing.

You may have also hear this one quote about the definition of insanity : doing the same thing each time and expecting a different result.  Repetition with the intent to change just isn't possible; You give the same-old, same-old, you get the same-old, same-old, period.

But if the status quo just isn't doing it for you anymore and you're desperate for a change, how do you get though without rocking the damn boat?

You don't.

• You possess a skill -- or more likely a particular set of skills -- that came easily to you and you've refined your control of it after long, focused practice. It's a skill-set people will pay you to exercise on their behalf. You can do something very well, and people will pay you enough to make a living wage. Using your skill-set in alignment with your goals, you found the sweet spot where your strengths and other peoples needs meet, and you're busy making sure you get to stay there and have a good time working it out.
  
• Life is too short to pass thing up for fear of what might happen, you reason, so why not choose to see what happens next by making the leap? Whatever you do, time will pass anyway, so might as well do things your way instead of waiting for someone to make your life for you.
  
• You don't quite fit anywhere else, and corporate culture gives you hives, literally.You found that out the hard way.
• From everything you've experienced, you learned that there's no security out there except for what you make yourself. (Yahoo Finance link)
  

Face it, there has to be something that keeps you going at work that in its most thankless and frazzling moments can leave you wishing you were back in kindergarten -- where all you had to think about was what color crayon to use, and whether it was nap-time yet (and if there were cookies after.) In its best moments, however, you  realize that it's all of you working in alignment to make something happen -- your knowledge, you skill, your mastery and your choices -- and while people are paying you for it, you live life on your own terms.

One of the dangers of running a business of your own is that it can end up owning you.

It happens a lot. You break out of the corporate world, say, to follow your own dreams -- then find out that you should have spent less time thinking about being finally free of The Man -- live the dream! Carpe diem!-- and more time on what it means to run things entirely on your own. Like, you know, by yourself. You're not only on the top of the ladder, you're the whole thing, including the bottom rung.

Following your passion doesn't mean happy-happy joy-joy all the live-long day. That's a side effect, and it doesn't stay for long. Following your passion doesn't even mean running your own business by default, come to think of it. Many people still work at what you'd consider boring jobs, but they save their 'passions' for outside the office, and indulge on their own time. And they want it that way. They build structure in their life to support their choices.  But running a business? And take note that the root word of passion is passio -- “suffering”. That in itself should give you a clue where I'm going with this.

Let's go with watching soap operas. Yeah, sure, they're way out there, the story lines are unbelievably byzantine, but for sheer escapism, they can't be beat. And you can always change the channel. You can't do that with a business.

Set aside the get-rich-quick promises you get spammed on, and what you've already seen on the news about "overnight" success. The Internet, while giving us an unprecedented gateway to publicize ourselves and connect to other people on a world-wide platform, also makes it easy to promote whatever would grab our attention -- thus the many promises of making easy money online, or the doom-patrol ringing bells about the moribund world economy.

It's hard to find your way between the extremes, since the extremes get the most attention and dominate the 'front pages', whether online or in print. Now "may be the best time to start a business" fights with the exact opposite advice.

You have to be able to separate the hype from solid information when it comes to trawling the internet for information. Discernment, from the Latin discernere (“to distinguish between, divide”) is one very good trait to practice. It helps save you from wasting time on fruitless pursuits, trains you to have an eye for value, and is a very good BS filter.

(Early hint: You think big, and act small.)

Life isn't just about putting out fires, saving the day, and checking off lists. It's not about racing at the treadmill or around the office. It's about finding out who you are and what you've got to leave this world. It's about finding meaning in what you do.

And if you can't find it, you make it.

You have to have something to show for what you did -- and are doing. Something that means you're here, and that your life has an impact on those around you. That you are leading your life in pursuit (or discovery) of something: meaning, purpose, relevance, what have you.

• An improved social condition, a good grade, a degree, a circle of good friends.
• A clutter-free house, for the most part, a restful haven from the pressure and speed of the outside world.
• A child who can now write all her lower-case letters clearly and knows how to say 'please', 'thank you' and 'you're welcome.'
• More limber hamstrings, knees that don't complain, a back that doesn't threaten to give out, an all-clear from the doctor regarding your blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
  
• Less anxiety over money matters, bolstered by an actual, working system to handle emergencies, with a good financial cushion in place.
  
• A healthy relationship with your loved ones. A graceful, grateful, humor-filled self-acceptance of who you are and who you're not.
  

It's a sure thing that you have your own goals and dreams in hand, and you've done a lot of things -- a lot -- to make these goals and dreams come true, so...what did you accomplish today, and what are you working on tomorrow?

Simple, isn't it? You can't win if you don't play. Seven words of one syllable each. The action lies in the words 'win' and 'play. Let's break them down.

Everybody wants to win. To win is to make it. To win is to hit it big. To win is to be popular. To win is to matter. Play, on the the other hand, gets something of a different spin in this context. You want to win? Play hard. Be aggressive. Give it all you got, and then some. Hoo-rah!

Now step back and dial it down a bit. Let's go use "win by playing" with "showing up for the game." With that, the sentence changes: You can't win if you don't play.  And you can't play if you don't show up.

The simple truth is that showing up doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win, but it certainly ups your chances when show up and you get in the game. Will you allow the specter of not-winning stop you from getting out there and giving it what you've got? Wait, don't answer that yet.

The rarely mentioned fear hovering in the background is: You have something. Time, youth, energy...something. And it's an exhaustible supply. When it runs out -- pfft! No more. All out. Dead end. You don't want to lose it, that hurts. And you might need it again, so you hold on.

So you're careful, or careless, as the case may be in your youthful days...but as experiences teaches you to be more circumspect with what you do, and be more careful with what you have, it can also cause you to latch onto things that, well, really can't stay with you no matter how much you try.

Think about it. Money? Taxes, or a financial downturn. A sudden illness that never quite goes away, or an accident nobody could ever have expected. (Which also covers the issue of health as well.) Youthfulness  on the outside can only last for so long, and then you start looking like you escaped from Madame Tussauds on a summer day.

Time? You run around with GTD lists , use GTD techniques and pay other people to do things for you you don't have the time to do yourself...and the time you saved still can't be carried over the next day, or pooled together at the end of the month and spent at a nice beach somewhere. Dammit.

And even if you 'save it up for later'...you still die. Morbid, but true -- and an undeniable kick-ass reminder: What are you saving it up for? More importantly, what are you holding back for? You only have one life --- it's not like you can hit a cosmic rewind button, you know. You can't edit or splices-over anything, except in your own mind, and too much of that has its own consequences.

So, to rephrase the earlier question: Will you let your fears dictate how you live your life?