Success Measured In Relevance

“The answer comes down to one simple question – relevance. Many entrepreneurs don’t want to just be successful. They want to be relevant. And they want to stay relevant.

Being relevant means people pay attention to you, care about what you have to say and talk about you.

Money alone can’t buy relevance.”

This is from a recent Michael Lazerow post & it reminded me a little of one of my personal needs.

In broad terms, happiness means success to me. But I’m also happy when I feel relevant; not just in professional life, but also my personal life.

I want to be heard, I want to be validated and I want the opportunity to just be me.

This isn’t some narcissistic thing that only a elite few people experience either; I bet if you ask yourself why you get up in the morning to work on whatever, somewhere within that reason there’s the need to be relevant. Everyone wants to be proud of themselves.

The shit thing about relevance however is that it’s very difficult to measure without doing so by the feedback of peers, which means you can’t control that. You don’t just wake up in the morning and feel relevant without getting that external feedback.

So how do you measure relevance (and indirectly, success) in a way that you can control yourself?