Authenticity, Courage, and Success
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with musings that are designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is January 18, 2025.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been Musing about success. What it means, and what gets in the way of achieving it. I’ve vigorously recommended that (a) the definition of success should be yours and not someone else’s, and (b) that one of the biggest blockers to achieving success is your worst critic—the “itty bitty shitty committee (IBSC)” that lives inside all our brains—the voices in our heads that tell us we’re not good enough and don’t deserve to achieve success.
This week, let’s begin to explore the ingredients that must be cultivated to achieve success. But before we do, just a reminder that the definition of success is one-size-fits-you.
The Definition of Success will Shift Over Time
Also, let’s be clear that your definition of success is highly likely to change as you move through the seasons of your life. What is incredibly important to you in your late 20’s is likely going to be different than your areas of focus in your 60’s. What tends to not change is your purpose—your reason for being—your “why am I here.”
Unfortunately, many of us are not exposed to, or encouraged to engage in the introspective thought that’s necessary to contemplate, explore, and connect with our personal purpose during the first few decades of our lives. Most people in their 20’s and 30’s have not committed to the work necessary to define personal purpose through exercises like my Personal Planning Guidebook. Introspective thought and analysis carries the stigma of weakness.
As a result, any visioning or goal setting we do is untethered from our purpose, leading us to make suboptimal decisions about what success really means. The lack of connection with our personal purpose makes it much easier to adopt definitions of success that are not ours and pull us in directions that are inauthentic and problematic.
In my own experience, I know now that I was put on this earth to Teach, Coach, Mentor, and Inspire. As I look back to my early 20’s, I had a feeling that this statement described my “why,” but I hadn’t invested in any of the introspection and personal exploration to clarify those feelings. As you might imagine, without a well-defined purpose, I made a number of suboptimal career and life decisions.
With the understanding that hindsight is 20/20, I do believe that I would have stepped in fewer mud puddles, hurt fewer people, and moved through my career with more efficiency, grace, dignity, and compassion had I done the work earlier to define my personal purpose.
To be as clear as possible, I believe strongly that being grounded in one’s personal purpose leads to a higher probability that intermediate-term vision statements and definitions of success will be more aligned and authentic to who you are at your core—minimizing the likelihood that you’ll adopt other people’s definitions of success. What’s better? Authenticity or superficiality? I chose authenticity. Superficiality has almost always gotten me in trouble.
How often should you engage in the personal planning process? Reevaluating this document and checking in on progress toward your chosen metrics for success should be done annually at a minimum. One should go through the full exercise every 3 to 5 years.
The Most Important Ingredient to Success - Courage
So what are the ingredients to success? The list of ingredients is long and will take us at least one more Muse to cover, but let’s start at the top. I believe the most important ingredient is courage. It takes courage to define your personal purpose. It takes courage to say: “I want to go there, learn that, build this, and move toward this desired future state.” It’s easy to stand still. It’s easy to follow the lead of others—to get lost in the crowd. It’s easy to watch the world go by.
It’s much harder and ultimately more rewarding to stand up for your purpose and create a vision and definition of success that aligns with your authentic, true self. It takes courage to say: “I need some help to understand who I am. I’m going to invest in third-party counseling to discover what drives me.” It takes courage to be the author and leader of your own story.
One of my mentors, the great Carl Schweser, would tell me: “Andy, if you’re not moving, you’re standing still.” Such simple, yet impactful advice. It takes courage to move forward in the face of the status quo, societal skepticism, and adversity. It takes courage to fail, learn, adjust, and continue moving forward.
When we meet again next week, we’ll continue building out the list of ingredients to success. Until then…
Grace. Dignity. Compassion.
