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| When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own books. MADE IT! |
How Do YOU Measure
Success
When I look around at my own life, I
can say that I am successful. If you were to ask my kids, my accountant or some
family members, they may have something else to say.
Too often,
we measure success based on where we want to be rather than where we have come
from. Even more often, we measure it based on what someone else tells us we
should be.
I can barely remember being cold and
hungry, but that was my childhood. Now, I’d rather be hungry than full. When my
stomach is full, I am uncomfortable, but when I am hungry I know without a
doubt that I will eat again and that I will never be as hungry as I was growing
up.
When one of
my children first came to me, she could barely read and write. She was 8 years
old and knew I had a great deal of work to do. I worked hard and she worked
harder and soon was on her way. One day, a new teacher called me in to say that
she was worried because my daughter was reading a year below her grade level. I
laughed and told her that this was amazing because it meant that in one year;
she had caught up for four.
My daughter
had been successful in her work but because she was not where here teacher
thought she should have been, her worked had been viewed as not quite enough.
We can’t measure our own success by
someone else’s standards. If I did, I could have stopped working long ago.
Our standards and goals should be sky
high and our work should match it, but these standards should be our own
creation, our drive should come from within and our need to do more should
never stop.
If we
determine our own success, we can constantly raise the bar. We can work harder
and harder without the prying prods of Wall Street, Oprah and someone else’s
idea of what God told them about you.
I am not
done, but I have done well.
Stop looking around at someone else’s
dream and make your own.
That’s it.
BE you, be well, be
your own success.
Bertice Berry, PhD.
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