Beyond the Black and White: Redefining Success on Your Own Terms

Have you ever felt like a failure despite making significant progress toward your goals? Or perhaps you've hit all the conventional success markers but still feel unfulfilled? You're not alone.

In our achievement-oriented society, we've been conditioned to view success as binary: you either succeed or fail. You're either making six figures or you're not successful. You either got the promotion or you didn't. You either have the perfect work-life balance, or you don't.

This black-and-white thinking prevents us from recognizing the nuanced spectrum of achievement and fulfillment that exists in reality. And more importantly, it disconnects us from what truly matters: our core values.

The Problem with Binary Success

Our brains naturally simplify complex information by categorizing it. While this helps us navigate a diverse world more efficiently, it creates a problematic tendency to think in absolutes when evaluating our achievements.

Consider how success is traditionally defined in professional settings:

  • Reaching a specific position (Director, VP, C-suite)

  • Earning above a certain salary threshold

  • Managing a large team

  • Working for a prestigious company

And personally:

  • Owning a particular type of home

  • Having specific types of relationships

  • Achieving certain milestones by predetermined ages

  • Projecting a curated image to others

These rigid definitions create internal dialogues that might sound familiar:

"I was trying to get the Senior Director promotion and didn't get it. That's because I wasn't good enough, disciplined enough. I'm not capable of reaching my goals. I'm not good enough to be successful."

This thought pattern completely disregards that you might have:

  • Made your skills and ambitions known to senior management

  • Received valuable feedback about what experience you need to develop

  • Strengthened key relationships within the organization

  • Improved critical skills in the process

Success is not a global absolute, but rather a personal perception that has a lot of gray area. When we acknowledge the complexities and nuances of achievement, we become more compassionate toward ourselves and others

Success as a Spectrum, Not a Switch

What if we reimagined success not as a binary outcome but as a continuum? What if we acknowledged that between absolute success and absolute failure lies a rich spectrum of growth, learning, and partial achievements?

This perspective shift isn't just psychologically healthier—it's more accurate. Few endeavors in life result in complete success or total failure. Most outcomes fall somewhere in between, and recognizing this helps us celebrate progress while maintaining motivation for continued growth.

The Values-Based Approach to Defining Success

At the heart of redefining success lies a crucial insight: true success is alignment with your core values, not external validation or arbitrary benchmarks.

Your values are what you find most important in life—they're the barometer you use to gauge whether something is good or bad, significant or insignificant, and whether it aligns with your true self or leads you astray.

When you define success through your values rather than societal expectations, several powerful shifts occur:

  1. You regain autonomy: Your sense of achievement is no longer dependent on others' recognition or external factors outside your control.

  2. You experience more fulfillment: When your actions align with your values, you experience greater satisfaction regardless of outcomes.

  3. You develop resilience: Setbacks become less devastating because your self-worth isn't tied exclusively to achievement.

  4. You make better decisions: Clear values provide a compass for navigating career and life choices.

Our values are things that we value the most—what we find important in life. They are the barometer we use to gauge whether something is good or bad, significant or insignificant, and whether it aligns with our true selves or leads us astray

1. Identify Your Core Values

Your values are your foundation—concepts like freedom, impact, creativity, connection, growth, balance, recognition, and security that guide your decisions and sense of fulfillment. While many values might seem important, most people have 4-5 core values that truly drive their life choices. Identifying these requires deep reflection and honesty with yourself about what matters most in creating a meaningful life. For a comprehensive guide to discovering your core values, including detailed exercises and frameworks, explore our complete values identification process.

2. Define Success and Failure for Each Value

For each core value, you'll need to create clear, realistic definitions of what success and failure look like in your specific life context. This isn't a mental exercise—write these down. The act of putting pen to paper (not typing) engages different neural pathways and forces you to slow down your thinking, helping you move beyond surface-level responses to deeper insights.

Ask yourself these questions for each value:

  • What does ultimate success look like in living this value?

  • What would constitute failure in expressing this value?

  • What's the minimum threshold for feeling aligned with this value?

The key is making these scenarios viable and realistic to your actual life circumstances. For example, if "freedom" is a core value in your professional life, success might look like having autonomy to make decisions and execute initiatives independently, while failure might look like being micromanaged with little say in decision-making. Your minimum threshold might be having input on how you complete your work, even if you don't control what work needs to be done.

Why does this matter? These definitions become your personal measuring stick—a way to evaluate situations objectively rather than getting caught in emotional reactions or external pressures. When you can clearly articulate what success and failure mean for your values, you gain the ability to recognize progress and make decisions that truly serve your authentic priorities.

For example, if "freedom" is a core value in your professional life:

  • Success might look like having autonomy to make decisions and execute initiatives independently

  • Failure might look like being micromanaged and having little say in decision-making

  • The minimum threshold might be having input on how you complete your work, even if you don't control what work needs to be done

3. Create a Success Spectrum

Between absolute success and failure lies a spectrum. By defining points along this spectrum, you create a more nuanced way to evaluate your alignment with your values.

For instance, on a 0-5 scale for professional freedom:

  • 0: Complete micromanagement; needing approval for every email

  • 1: Having agreed-upon objectives but still needing frequent approval on execution

  • 2: Having autonomy over daily tasks but requiring approval for major decisions

  • 3: Having significant independence in how you manage projects

  • 4: Having the ability to initiate new projects with minimal oversight

  • 5: Complete autonomy in decision-making and implementation

4. Apply Your Success Spectrum to Real Situations

Use your personalized spectrum to evaluate current aspects of your life:

  • How does your current job align with your values?

  • How are you spending your time relative to what you value most?

  • Which values need more attention and focus?

This application helps you recognize that you might be more successful than you think in some areas, while identifying opportunities for greater alignment in others.

How to Define Your Own Success

Defining personal and professional success on your own terms involves several key steps:

A Personal Experience

When I first began exploring my own definition of success, I discovered that "impact" was one of my core values. In the corporate world, I had equated impact with the size of my team and budget. But after deeper reflection, I realized that true impact for me meant creating meaningful change in people's lives.

"While we may not achieve a perfect score in all our values, we can gain enough self-awareness to recognize where we stand and realize that things are not as bad as they might seem. This truth source combats negative self-talk and unhelpful beliefs, ultimately increasing our satisfaction."

This insight completely transformed how I evaluated my career. What initially seemed like a "failure" (leaving a high-status corporate position) became a success when measured against my authentic value of impact. Today, through coaching and mentoring, I'm able to directly help individuals transform their lives and careers—creating the kind of impact that truly fulfills me.

The Professional and Personal Connection

While we often separate personal and professional success, the reality is they're deeply interconnected. When your career takes you far outside your personal values, you'll inevitably feel unfulfilled and unaligned. Similarly, personal choices that conflict with your professional values create tension and dissatisfaction.

By defining success in both domains based on your core values, you create harmony and consistency that enhances fulfillment across all aspects of your life.

Moving Beyond Binary Thinking

As you begin defining success on your own terms, remember that this is a practice, not a one-time exercise. Your values may evolve, and your understanding of what success looks like in relation to those values will deepen over time.

The goal isn't to erase all binary thinking—sometimes clear success/failure distinctions are useful—but rather to develop a more nuanced perspective that honors the complexity of human achievement and fulfillment.

Take the Next Step

If you're ready to move beyond black-and-white definitions of success and create a personally meaningful framework for evaluating your life and career, I've developed comprehensive courses to guide you through the process:

  • Defining Personal Success: Discover how to align your daily life with your core values and create a fulfilling definition of personal achievement.

  • Defining Professional Success: Learn to navigate your career path based on your authentic values rather than external expectations.

Both courses provide structured guidance through the values identification process, creating your success spectrum, and applying these insights to real-life decisions.

Remember, true success isn't about checking predetermined boxes—it's about creating a life aligned with what matters most to you.