The irony is that when you're starting in your career, you have to say yes to everything, because that's how you get momentum. Your framework for deciding when to say yes or no… should be no most of the time.
“Jonathan Fader, who is a sports psychologist, talks about how in professional baseball, you become a professional baseball player by your ability to swing at pitches, but you stay in the professional leagues based on your ability not to swing at pitches, to be able to discern a good pitch from a bad pitch. When people over-commit, they don't think about things like, ‘Oh, I'm going to the gym now less because I don't have time.’ But those costs are very real.” And then, personally, you're also probably saying no to your kids or your spouse, or even just taking care of yourself. I have to remind myself constantly that when I'm scheduling things, or when I'm saying yes to things, I'm saying no to the most important thing professionally, which is my work. You spend an hour sitting alone writing, you actually don't know what the ROI is on that, because it's measured so far off in the distance. The problem is you get the ROI from doing the press, you put in an hour of your time, you sell X amount of copies. However, what's being pushed aside is the most important thing that I do, which is sitting down to write. I could do that: I could record them back-to-back-to-back, and that would seem as if it were good for my writing career. Let's say I agree to do 50 podcasts today. So that's something that I have to think about a lot in my own life. We think that life is about taking on opportunities, however, success might be more about knowing which opportunities to reject. It can be, but again, I think that can be very limiting. “We think success is having more and more responsibilities and having more and more projects on your plate. Of course, this requires some financial freedom, but it's primarily about the ability to make your own decisions, live your life the way that you want it to be, and be in control of your career.”
So, to me, success is waking up and being in control of my day. What is more alarming is that the nature of the success circumscribes what they're able to do because it takes up so much of their time. When I see very successful people who have next-to-no freedom in their life because the success circumscribes who they're supposed to be, to me, that isn't success. He shared, “To me, success is primarily indicated by autonomy.
So, I asked Holiday how he now defines success for himself. More important, however, is doing a gut check to determine if the goal is yours, or someone else’s.
Before setting out to achieve something, you first have to decide on the goal.