Success: a difficult thing to define. Last Sunday at the Fairfield University 2002 Leadership Conference, speaker John Spence referred to personal success as, “When your self-concept and core values are in harmony with your lifestyle and behaviors.”
He also suggested that there are three necessary components of success: 1) knowledge 2) network, and 3) love. In this context, the environment at Fairfield would be conducive to success: our university has astute professors, accomplished alumni, and offers a “hand-holding” experience during the interim between “home with Mom and Dad” and the “real world” of independence.
So how, in our Fairfield-bubble, can we relate success to our lives? Fairfield students gave me answers to this question that covered the whole spectrum, from “Hooking up with a woman who has one or all of these characteristics: status, money, or model-looking,” to, “Simply giving your best effort.” Most could not cite a definitive answer.
Recently, Harvard Business School professor Howard H. Stevenson posed the question at a presentation for alumni, Would you really want to be people such as Rupert Murdoch, Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlop, and Madonna? More importantly, he added, would you want your children to be these people? Although viewing success in terms of our future children may not be feasible at our age, Stevenson has an inherent point: there are many different relative terms of success and just because Madonna is successful, her standards or values may not be applicable to us.
Defining your own yardstick for success can often be quite difficult, according to Stevenson. People who fit our conventional notions of success display a lot of positive features. Passion, focus and positive attitudes.
Successful people are good at matching goals with their own skillsets; they lead a team of believers; they take risks; they are lucky, hard workers, fierce competitors; they overcome challenges; they had a high dissatisfaction with their environment.
It seems that if there is such a thing as “ultimate success” it is an amalgamation of highly erratic, unpredictable forces. As students, we are still learning and growing. We will make mistakes and we will ascertain new and different values from those mistakes. We must concentrate on the forces of success that we can engineer. Stevenson’s criterion for success is more complex and highly evolved than the definition John Spence provided.
So are you, Mister or Miss Fairfield, the picture of success? Do you define success in terms of this university, your social community, or the larger, global picture? I’d like to ask the student who defines success as “hooking up with a rich, powerful, beautiful woman,” what are you going to do next spring when you graduate?
We are in an environment where there is a lot of temptation to get off the track to success (namely, the beach, the Seagrape, Russell’s, the townhouses). Nevertheless, we have to remember that college is a limited, clearly defined period of four years where we have to establish our direction and our “yardstick” for success. So in your quest for knowledge, parties, beer, the opposite sex, athletic accolades, and friendships, make sure you grab the bull by the horns and keep success within sight.
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