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I asked everyone from a billionaire tech founder to a former Navy SEAL commander what it means to be successful, and money was only an afterthought by Sarah Wyman and Richard Feloni on Aug 28, 2018, 2:23 PM Advertisement
 When success is discussed in terms of careers, it's often referring to wealth and influence. But after many interviews with people at the top of a wide range of industries, we've realized that those metrics don't mean much on their own. We've compiled our favorite answers to the question at the heart of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success": How do you personally define success? We start by examining the nature of attaining it with a reply from LinkedIn's billionaire cofounder Reid Hoffman, and then explore how people from former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink to media mogul Tina Brown measure success in their lives. Read some of our favorite answers below: SEE ALSO: Drybar founder Alli Webb explains how she took a project she started as a stay-at-home mom and turned it into a multimillion-dollar business with more than 100 locations LinkedIn co-founder and tech investor Reid Hoffman says success takes a mixture of luck and skill  Reid Hoffman: "Some people who are successful like to say, 'It's all skill! It was my capabilities!' And it's like, no, no. Like, I was lucky to have been born in the Stanford Hospital, to have gone to Stanford, to know about the network, to participate in it, to make some great friends and connections that kind of helped me along with it. All of that stuff is hugely serendipitous. On the other hand, you also try to think and act strategic as you could, you try to learn constantly, you work hundred-hour weeks, are constantly kind of trading lessons and information with each other in order to make it happen. So, the short answer is it's both: massively luck and massively hard work. Sometimes it's more luck than hard work, and sometimes it's more hard work than luck. But every success requires both."
Ellevest founder and CEO Sallie Krawcheck defines success through the impact her work has on others  Sallie Krawcheck: "It's impact. I thought about this a lot. After I left Bank of America I spent better part of a year trying to decide what was important to me. Success is impact. I could have gone back to a big company. I could have had a much bigger office. I could've been more comfortable on a day-to-day basis. The great thing about what's going on in business today is you can have an impact, maybe even a greater impact at a small company, whereas historically it had to be at a big company. If you have a great idea, you can get it out there for free. For free. You head onto Twitter, head over to Facebook. It doesn't necessarily have to go viral. By being out there with that idea consistently, and if it's a good one, people will listen to it, gravitate towards it, and there are many more press outlets as well so that you can find places that are interested in something that may not have been as interesting for a broad audience. Combine that with being at a startup, you can move so much more quickly, so much more quickly than a big company, all of a sudden I can make the argument you can have a greater impact on people's behavior from a startup than you can from one of the big guys."
'Million Dollar Listing' star and real estate mogul Ryan Serhant stays on track to success by setting goals  Ryan Serhant: "Now, I define success by hitting goals that I set for myself, and it's not about money. It's not about lifestyle, it's not about building a bigger team, or anything. It's that I set goals for myself, and I write them down every year, and if I hit those goals, I have been successful that year. If I don't hit those goals, then I have failed that year. That way, success isn't this big lofty thing that's up there in the clouds, and it's not just like, I want to be a billionaire. Like, that's stupid, right. There's no plan of action that's set there. There's nothing that drives me crazier than someone who comes to me, says, 'Yo, I'm an entrepreneur, this is what I do, this is what I sell, I sell this, I do this, I'm building this company'. I'm like, OK, what did you do last week? They're like, 'Well, I was in the Hamptons last week, played golf on Sunday, but like Monday through Friday...' No, no, no. If you want to build your own business, you do it seven days a week. I did not take a single day off for three years. And it's easy for me to say now, but really, really hard to do, and it's really hard for a lot of people to do, as well. So, you have to figure out what you really, really want, and stick to it. The other thing I would say is, you don't have to do it by yourself when you start. That's probably a mistake that I made. I think I would've grown faster, but I started by myself because I didn't have that stick to intuitiveness to real estate. I didn't really know that that's what I wanted to do, it was kind of weird. I didn't see myself as being a real estate broker. I didn't even like real estate brokers. And so, I was doing other things at the same time. If I had maybe worked on someone else's team, if I had maybe worked for another company, if I had maybe learned by watching successful people do what they do instead of just trying by myself to do it, it would've been better."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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