This was originally posted on blogger.

I had a new idea occur to me yesterday as I was biking, so I’m going to chew it over here.

I was thinking about the question, “how do you define success?” Everyone has their own definition, of course. But I imagine that most definitions have something to do with a weighted combination of these factors:

• Friendships and community
• Artistic output
• Good health and athleticism
• Legacy (via. children, organizations)
• Career success or impact (not directed correlated with money)
• Money (net worth, income)

When I break down success into these aspects, I can more or less imagine what my goals are. For instance, artistic output: to make music, to be able to draw or blog and make things that are worth reading or listening to. With friendships, it’s to have a lot of cool people around me that I enjoy being around. That’s all great.

The point of this blog post is that these things are outputs not inputs to life. For instance, you can put a lot of effort into making friends and search all over town for your people, but it’s not a given that you’ll find them. That depends on the city you live in, what organizations are around, the personality of your city/town, in addition to your own friend-making mindset. The same thing goes for money, career success, good health, etc. You can put effort and orient your life around those things, but that doesn’t mean necessarily that you’ll be “successful” in those respects.

It’s cliche, but a lot of trouble comes when we base our self-worth on things outside of our control. It’s cliche and yet, I still find myself doing it. This person runs a 5k faster than I do; this person earns more money than me; this person has a more active social life. Of course, their output may make them look more “successful” but you actually may have been putting in more work!

But what are the inputs to this equation? Inputs are things that we can directly adjust about our own life. It doesn’t require help from our external environments, it just requires you reading, learning, and digging deep. Not easy, but possible, and within your control. I thought of three important inputs:

• Skills
• Mindset/personality
• Routine

Let me explain.

Skills. Pretty simple, but it helps to see how this connects to life outputs. Skills are things like learning a language, computer programming, mathematics, public speaking. Most people want to learn skills for some external reason – it can help them get a job or pursue a hobby. Skills grow slowly but I do think that they’re mostly in your control. You can learn almost anything from Youtube, reading books (which you can pirate), etc. With good skills you can advance your career, make money, produce more artistic content, etc. Of course, there is some reverse causality; with more money you can hire a coach or teacher for certain skills. Still, even people with all the money in the world don’t learn (say) how to play the piano faster. They maybe just have more time and focus to dedicate to it.

Mindset. Now this is a hard one, but important. I think your mindset affects all sorts of things in your life: your resilience, your persistence with things you want to pursue, your attitude towards meeting people or maintaining connects. Being a go-getter, being out-going (when needed) or fully focused on studying (when needed) are all traits of a good personality (to me), but that depends on what outputs you’re orienting towards. A lot of people I think are successful in companies or in certain jobs because they have a good mindset for it, and that lets them learn the requisite skills. For instance, in computer programming you have to have the persistence to debug and debug until you find the issue. In teaching (my job right now), you must stay above the whims of every single student and keep the goal of the lesson in mind. Mindset can be cultivated by reflection, meditation, reading books, practicing good thought-patterns. But as with anything we start with a certain mindset given by our parents, teachers, and peers.

Routine. I’ve found that routine is important for actually deploying / growing skills and making use of a good mindset. For instance, you can have a great mindset and skill at learning a foreign language but if you don’t carve out time in your schedule for it regularly, you won’t really progress [see note below].

I think there’s a lot of ways that these three things – skills, mindset, and routine – factor into your outputs. Too many combinations to discuss here… but regardless, the point is that to define “success” you should look at inputs: what you’re putting into your life. You may disagree on what exact inputs you believe are important or relevant to your life but there are some for everybody. Outputs, again, vary by the person but all of them are too unpredictable. Tracking something out of your control might make your feel bad, or (worse yet) give you an inflated ego.

And so going forward I want to thing about my inputs. Am I focusing on developing skills that I care about and enjoy? Am I cultivating a positive mindset in my endeavors (social, professional, interest-wise)? And am I establishing a consistent routine in my life to make use of my time? Whoosh. Big questions, and I’m no self-help blogger, so best I stay away from topics like these.

Note: About time. Time is interesting – is it an input or an output? Some people always are yearning for more time; students, working professionals, well really anyone. But some people have more time than they know what to do with, like kids on summer vacation. Time I think has to be combined with a routine, mindset, or skill you’re focusing on to be put to good use. I’d say time is an environmental factor. At a given stage in your life, you can’t really control how much of it you have. But you can routinize it so that it’s better structured.