The BEST Way to Achieve Success | Define What Success Means to You

Success.

Success. Success.

Define success for yourself.

Define success.

Success.

Define success for yourself.

Definition of success.

Success.

Hello, Believe Nation! Today I want you to learn how to define success for yourself. And as always, guys, as you are watching this video, if you hear something that really inspires you, please leave it in the comments below. Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired. Inspired as well. Enjoy!

I think that financial success is not success. You know, to me, when people say— for example, I showed Pan's Labyrinth and somebody said, "Why don't you take out the violence?" And it was very well-meaning. "Why don't you take out the violence so you can reach a wider audience?" That's because I don't fucking want a wider audience. I want the audience for the movie. Each movie has an audience. That's it. It's not going to get more or less if you fuck with it, if you amputate it, if you cripple it. That's all you do. You know, people dream of a bigger audience, and I go, well, you know, yeah, but is it the movie? If in order to make more people happy, the, you know, Cinderella doesn't get the prince at the end. I don't know. It's not the same tale. As much as I like the Disney films of the Renaissance of animation, I can't, every time I see The Little Mermaid, I think, but she dies in the book. She dies at the end. That's what made it beautiful, that the prince was ultimately so stupid. And I understand they are reaching a wider audience, but is it the tale that Hans Christian Andersen wrote? No fucking way.

Way.

It's a different movie. It's a different tale. So if you're asking me, was Little Mermaid successful as a film? I say it was, but it wasn't the tale. It's a great— I love those films. I really think they're beautifully constructed, but it's not the tale. So Pan's Labyrinth, without the violence, is not Pan's Labyrinth. It's, I don't know, it's a fantasy like Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy film.

Greatness is a different definition to different people. Greatness to me is fucking when I land that fucking fakie half cab hill on my skateboard or some shit. Greatness is the fucking song I recorded last week. Somebody might not find that great, but it's great to me. And that's all that matters, what the fuck I think in my head. As long as I like it, that's all that matters. Greatness to me is finally getting my video on MTV. It's on there now, and I'm fucking— I'm happy. I finally got my shit on fucking MTV. Some people might think that's selling out or whatever, but I don't really give a fuck. That's fucking great to me. I'm proud of myself. I've been wanting that since I was 7 years old, and I finally got that shit. Hard work pays the fuck off.

At the end of our session yesterday, you said, "Thank you to Scott for reviving my career." And I don't know if that's in jest, because I've never had the impression that you you're desperate for box office, but that you choose—

I'm gagging for it. It's been my— it's been the thrust of my interests since day one when I was about 19. Yeah, it's all I care about. 20 years of failures will do that to you.

But on a different level, why do you say that, and how do you feel when you choose a role that ends up satisfying you, that this one clearly did?

Well, you know, for me, with every character that you play, you know, as long as you've reached that— you've arrived at that place where you believe is the right place to be for the character, and if you feel that you've done service to the director, to yourself, to the author, then to me, to me that's a success. Box office is kind of, you know, that's something else. That's certainly none of my business, you know what I mean? Once I'm wrapped on a film, it's just to say goodbye to the character and then move forward.

Everyone in this room wants to make it, but I question how you would recognize making it. What is making it? Well, what do you want to be? Who in here wants a record deal? Would it be nice to have a record deal, right? We want a record deal. Okay, well, what does a record deal look like? What does making it look like? Do you want to sell a million copies, 2 million copies? Well, okay, let's say selling 2 million copies is like selling 10 million copies 10 years ago. So let's say you say to yourself, my expectation is that I want to be an artist and I want to put records out and I want to sell millions of copies. If that's your expectation, Great. Then you sort of skip straight to another questionnaire, you know, okay, if you answered yes to "Do I want to be a pop star?" "Do I want to make music for as many people as possible?" Now you have to sort of change your game to fit the expectation. You now have to wonder about, is your song shorter than 4 minutes? Do you get to your chorus fast enough? These are things you have to absolutely do. And you also have to compromise, and you also have to play the game, you know. And by defining your expectations, if you decide that you want to be a pop star— that's not a dirty word, it just means— pop just means popular. Frank Sinatra was a pop star. Jimi Hendrix was a pop star. Lots of people were pop stars. What kind of pop star? Lots of people are jazz musicians. What kind of jazz musician?

You can be—

you can define the genre any way you want. So if you said you want to be a pop star, then you have to look at your songs. There's also people here who are a little dishonest about what they really want to be. And I think if you want to be famous, if you want to make music for as many people as possible, just come out and say it. Don't say, "I want to be indie. I'm just going to be an independent artist," and really secretly wish that you wanted to be a pop star. Because from the very beginning, it's disingenuous. There's nothing wrong with saying, "I want to play music for as many people as possible," without compromising the things that I have to be as an artist. And that's what I've done. Sony Music doesn't come into the studio when I'm making a record, but I also know what's gonna be a hit, or what stands the chance of being a hit, and what just doesn't. And it's a level of honesty with yourself that you have to have before you hand your music out to anybody else. So that's sort of what I wanna say about expectations. If you only recognize success has a record deal and a big fat Publishers Clearing House oversized Tiger Woods check and a dinner and then going to the top of the roof and screaming, "I made it!" Most of you will be stunning failures.

So if you had to give someone who's recently graduating from our program a piece of advice, what would you say?

I would say to learn and to execute on your unique vision. Define success for yourself, figure out what that means to you. Don't get taken over by the world's definition of success or your family's or what your friends are doing or what anyone says that equals success. Once you can get clear on that vision, then you need to create a plan to make that come to life and to prioritize. I think one of the biggest tragedies of our time is I hear so many people from every walk of life, health coaches all over, feeling so overwhelmed and overworked, and there's so much that they can do that they feel paralyzed. Well, I don't know what to do first, or what— how do I make all of this happen? And I think that we all need to take a few steps back and start to get clear on our own vision for success and then actually prioritize making that come to life, because then it gives you such clarity and such freedom, and all of that static and the overwhelm starts to fall away.

I define success two ways. One, what I do here at the firm. The impact that I create for my clients, the impact that I create for the partnership, now the new role that I have, the legacy that I leave. That is one way that I will define success. You know, I'm not a great cricketer. I love cricket. I wish I was as good as Sachin Tendulkar. I'm not. This is my life's work. What I do here is my life's work. It will define me. And the second thing that will define me is what my 11-year-old son thinks of me when he becomes a man. These are the two things that define success for me. And in that is a little bit of a conundrum because I love what I do. It is, as I said, my life's work. I love my son more than I love myself. And there is a constant tug. There isn't enough hours in the day to be to be able to do both extremely well. And so that is my challenge.

How do you define success for you?

What is success to you?

I guess success is when people are listening and there's some measurable change in consciousness worldwide, even if the needle barely moves. You know, I think that if you're communicating ideas and telling stories, if the feedback, If the feedback is that those seeds are landing on fertile soil, that's success. I think, you know, I would say I felt that even more with Avatar than with Titanic. Titanic, we definitely moved people for a couple of hours, and they cried, and then they left, and that was that, you know? Avatar is a different story because it lingered with them, and, you know, dare I say, maybe even to some tiny, tiny degree may influence influence their perspective on how we're behaving with respect to the natural world and basically the destruction that we're causing.

Define success for yourself. You already like that one? Define success for yourself. Now check this out. I'm in south of New Orleans a few years ago and I went to a voodoo shop and they had this wooden partition against the wall with these columns. And in these columns were all these vials of these magic potions, right? And the headings above each potion defining what they would give you were things like fertility, health, family, legal health, energy, forgiveness, money. Hmm, guess which column was empty? Money. Money is king today. It's what makes the world go round. It is success. The more we have, the more successful we are, right? Now I would argue that our cultural values have even been financialized. Financialized. Humility's not in vogue anymore. It's too passive. It's a get-rich-quick-on-the-internet, richest 15 minutes of fame world that we live in, and we see it every day. But we all want to succeed, right? So the question that we got to ask ourselves is what success is to us. What success is to you? Is it more money? That's fine. I got nothing against money. I don't. Maybe it's a healthy family. Maybe it's a happy marriage. Maybe it's to help others, to be famous, to be spiritually sound, to leave the world a little bit better place than you found it. Continue to ask yourself that question. Now, your answer may change over time, and that's fine, but do yourself this favor: whatever your answer is, don't choose anything that will jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don't spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don't drink the Kool-Aid, man. It tastes sweet, but you will get cavities tomorrow. All right, life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill, but first answer that question, what's my hill? So me, how do I define success? For me, myself? Well, for me it's a measurement of 5 things. We got fatherhood. We got being a good husband. We got my health, mind, body, and spirit. We got career. And we got friendships. These are what's important to me in my life right now. So I try to measure these 5 things each day. I check in with them. I like to see whether or not I'm in the debit section or the credit section with each one. Am I in the red or am I in the black? You follow? For instance, sometimes, say my career's rolling, all right? It's way up here in the black, but I see how my relationship with my wife maybe could use a little bit more of my attention. I gotta pick up the slack on being a better husband. Well, get that one out of the red. Or say my spiritual health could use some maintenance. It's down here, but hey man, my friendships and my social life, they're in high gear, right? I gotta recalibrate. Checks and balances. I gotta go to church, remember to say thank you more often, something. But I gotta take the tally, because I wanna keep all 5 in healthy shape. and I know that if I don't take care of them, if I don't keep up maintenance on them, one of them is going to get weak, man. It's going to dip too deep into the debit section. It's going to go bankrupt. It's going to get sick, die even. So first we have to define success for ourselves, and then we have to put in the work to maintain it. Take that daily tally, tend our garden. Keep the things that are important to us in good shape. I mean, let's admit it, we've all got two wolves in us, a good one and a bad one, and they both want to eat. The best I can tell, we just got to feed that good one a little more than the other one.

One thing I believe is it's really important to define your own success. It's really important to decide for yourself, uh, what success looks like, as opposed to letting someone else impose their definition of success upon upon you. So whenever you begin a big project, if you're doing something on your own, if you're starting a business or a blog or going back to school, or even if it's an exercise program, whatever it is, you know, you should have your own definition of success.

I, I need to make sure that everybody knows success is not money, right? Money drives you up to your problems in a limousine, right? So success is sometimes being a great parent, a great, uh, uh, dedicating yourself to your faith. There are so many people that don't necessarily have millions and millions of dollars, and they're happier than many of us ever will be.

Yeah.

So I don't want to, you know, overpush the fact of money is success because that's not the case.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know, what did you think of this video? What clip resonated the most with you? What are you going to immediately apply to your life or to your business? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm also super curious, how do you define success for yourself? What does that look like for you? Leave it in the comments. I'm gonna join in the discussion. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Bleedoti. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and making that fun YouTube tribute video. I really, really, really appreciate the effort and the love. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.