I argue that success isn’t exclusively about what you achieve, but also how you achieve it.
Jim Loehr
How do you define success, and how do you achieve it? These two questions are a couple of the most important questions for your life. Yet, I wonder how often people ask these questions and then actually live the answers.
I was listening to a podcast in which Jim Loehr, a sports psychologist and high-performance coach who has been a coach to numerous successful athletes and leaders in various industries, discussed achievement, performance, and fulfillment. (You can also read an Harvard Business Review article that was written years back when he first started writing about his research but has information that is still valuable today.) His interview highlighted three areas that I often see in leaders which are achievement, purpose and character. Let’s look at each of these aspects:
Achievement
A needed characteristic of success is drive. It is great if you can see your picture of success, but if you don’t have the drive to get there, you won’t. A typical characteristic that brings a person to a leadership position is that they have a drive to achieve success.
However, a drive to simply achieve results can “look” successful but actually be unfulfilling. If you achieve results and there is not a lasting meaning behind those results, you will put yourself on a constant treadmill of achieving one result after another. You begin to realize that you are going nowhere, become exhausted by the treadmill, and lose your performance edge.
I have experienced this in my own life as early as high school. I was on a constant treadmill to gain results. I thought that when I graduated that I would “arrive” and get off the treadmill. However, in college I found myself on the same treadmill of goals to results. It was at this point I started to understand the journey to purpose that then helped me to achieve but without the treadmill of goals that lacked a deeper destination.
Purpose
This is where we also need the intersection of purpose with achievement. Purpose is a clarity of your life calling that brings a deeper meaning to your life. It is your unique strengths and wiring (head) connecting with your passions (heart) to have an impact the world (hands). Our purpose is also an important part of informing our picture of success.
When purpose and achievement combine, you gain a journey to success with fulfillment. If you have a purpose that helps paint a picture of success but without the achievement to get there, you simply have dreams of success and also lack of fulfillment. If you have no purpose and no achievement, you find yourself in a place of desolation with lack of success and fulfillment. Below is a visual chart of this:
I know someone who is extremely talented. She started the journey to clarify her purpose and a picture of how that tied to success; however, when she would hit an obstacle, she would give up. She then would change her picture of success, hit an obstacle, and give up. Eventually, she even loss her clarity of purpose and the lack of fulfillment is evident in her life. It is also sad to see the reservoir of potential in her that is not being tapped.
Character
So, we need both purpose and achievement. Character is the how of getting to success. Jim Loehr states in his article, 40 Years Training the Biggest Names in Business and Sports Taught Me This:
So, we think of legacy in terms of the impact you want to leave for others when you’re gone. How you affected and enriched their lives. The way in which you connect to others – with honesty, integrity, empathy, humility. Those traits are in fact character traits. They are the how.
The words honesty, integrity, empathy, and humility resonate with me. They paint a picture for me of being child-like. Let me clarify, I am saying “child-like” and not “childish.” There is a difference. I see child-like being a state of surrender to be your authentic self. It is an honesty and integrity about who you are along with a humility and empathy that you live outward with others.
This creates a strong team. When each person is clear on their strengths and purpose and then combine it with humility and empathy for each other, it creates a high-performance team that can channel energy into a shared purpose.
Purpose inspires vision, achievement fuels mission, and character is the foundation of the core values of who we are. On the achievement-purpose chart, what quadrant are you living in? Do you want this to change? What quadrant are other members of your team in? Are you showing humility and empathy in this discovery for yourself and others? What are you willing to do different today so you can increase yours and others’ fulfillment in the journey to success through purpose, achievement, and character?