I don’t have the answers. Believe me, I wish I did. I can’t tell you the steps you should take in order to be successful. I can’t give you a magic combination that will lead you to your goals. There is no universal strategy that everyone uses. I don’t have the answers, but from personal experience if I had anything to offer, it is this.

Define success on your OWN terms. We are constantly making decisions based on what someone else wants for us. The problem with that is that we have no sense of self and are not in tune with what we want for ourselves. We are only chasing after someone else’s idea of success. You have to define success for yourself or else you will go crazy. Spend some time with yourself, look inward and really get in tune with what you want for yourself, regardless of other people’s opinions. What do YOU want in life? Where do YOU want to be? What makes YOU happy?

You are going at your OWN pace and that’s okay. You may be in a different place than someone but that doesn’t mean you are less successful than them. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you won’t make it or you should get a new dream. Just because you haven’t reached your goal yet doesn’t mean you won’t make it there someday. Take your time, listen to your heart and trust in God’s timing. You are where you need to be and you have plenty of time to figure out where you want to be. You are going at the pace that works for you and if you continue to work hard and stay focused, you will reach the goals you set for yourself.

Success isn’t about the end result, it’s about the process. Success could be as simple as getting out of bed in the morning when you just want to sleep in. It could be finishing a presentation that you were so nervous about all week. It could be picking up the phone and making a phone call that you had been dreading. It could be checking off a few assignments from a long list of work you have do. Success isn’t just money and material possessions that give you status, it’s about the little moments that help you to grow.

Don’t let your failures define you. You are NOT your failures. Use your failures to motivate you because we cannot know success without failure. There will be times when you don’t get the result you want. There will be days when nothing seems to go the way you planned and you feel like giving up. However, there will also be days when everything goes right and you accomplish everything you set your mind to. There will be days when all of your hard work pays of and you can say, “I made it." When you feel like giving up, keep going because when you do accomplish those goals it is the most satisfying feeling in the world and it is so worth it.