How I Define Success

Without Sacrificing My Beliefs, Values, or Marriage

We all have hopes and dreams about what we want to accomplish in life. As a young boy, I was fascinated by nature. Trees, plants, rocks, and bugs captured my attention more than playing sports. I dreamed of becoming a scientist and pursued that dream through college by graduating with a degree in Biology.

Dreams change, and the definition of success evolve.

I struggle with defining success for my life because, for me, money isn’t the center of success. Sure, I strive to provide for my family to the best of my ability, but it’s my wife and three kids that motivate me, not money.

Unfortunately, early in our marriage, I believed that it was acceptable to sacrifice my relationship with my wife and kids to provide for them. Consequently, I missed most of my wife’s first pregnancy because I thought that working 70–80 hours a week proved my love for them when my wife would have gladly exchanged a smaller paycheck for quality time with me.

I’ve sensed learned my lesson and have made several career changes that allowed more time with my family.

I continued to struggle with defining success that didn’t include financial achievement until I recently attended a Dare To Grow Rich personal development training where I learned a definition of success that resonated with me. It’s funny, even contradictory that I went to an event with the word RICH in the title since my goal in life isn’t to make a lot of money, but RICH stands for Responsibility, Integrity, Courage, and Humility.

The description of success was liberating because all I needed was to identify a worthwhile goal then take steps toward that goal. The worthwhile goal had to meet several criteria:

My wife recently celebrated 19 years of marriage, which is an outstanding accomplishment given the struggles we had to overcome, including a family history of divorce. We invested time, money, emotions, heartaches, and headaches to have the great marriage we have today. The goal, or call it a vision if you want, that we came up with took all 19 years to develop. It wasn’t something that we knew we desired as a little kid like my dream of studying science. We had to journey through life together to find it, and I still believe that it’s less of realizing the goal but more about the experiences my wife and I encounter while working towards it.

Are you wondering about our goal?

Here it is:

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