Progress is a Form of Success

I hear stories of people who won the lottery only to have lost all of it. Those who earned overnight fame, only to be crippled with the pressure of it. The truth is, overnight successes don’t usually happen, and when they do, people are typically ill-equipped for it since they have not built up the skills over time to manage their successes at a high level.

If you don’t know how to manage $100,000, you won’t be equipped to manage $1 million.

If you don’t know how to manage a team, you won’t know how to manage a company.

If you don’t know how to maintain your house, you won’t know how to manage a mansion.

Often, people only think of the destination. They think of what they’ll do when they get that big prize, but there’s a lot more to it once you get the prize. How do you maintain or grow the prize? If you don’t know how to do that, you’ll fall as quickly as you rise.

Ever since I’ve transitioned from 9-5 to working for myself, one skill that I’ve had to learn is time management at a higher level. When I was working my 9-5, most of my day was decided for. I have preset meeting times and pockets of time in between to do work. Now, with all the free time in the world, I have to dictate my working times, meeting times, break times, all on my own. I have complete freedom but have to be completely accountable at the same time for what I do and what I produce. I see this as a rite of passage for running a company and freedom of work, time, and location. I have to build this muscle of disciplined work and effective time management without anyone telling me to in order to advance to the next level.

I don’t believe in anything that guarantees quick success because you’re trading in the skills, which no one can take away from you and are transferrable, for something fragile and impermanent.

This mindset shift of learning the skills vs reaching a specific goal has helped me view success more sustainably. To know that by solving the challenges I’m facing now, I’m preparing myself for bigger things ahead, and that’s a really exciting prospect.

After all, progression is a form of success.