Success Is Wanting To Be Where You Are

There are a lot of definitions of success but recently I heard a new one that I really liked. James Clear, the author of “Atomic Habits” said in his weekly Newsletter “Success is wanting to be where you are.”

I thought it was profoundly simple and accurate. One of the most basic desires we have is freedom. We often think about that in the most threatening sense, where the alternative is enslavement or oppression from a governmental level. Unfortunately there are still people to this day who don’t have this most basic freedom. It’s devastating.

But freedom actually takes on more personalities than that. Of course, freedom starts with having free will and the autonomy to make your own choices. When you have financial freedom, you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to afford your dream lifestyle. When you have time freedom, you can spend your days doing whatever you want without feeling obligated to do anything else. When you have location freedom, it means that you can navigate the world however you’d like and make the choices that align most with you want.

This new definition of success suggests that you’ve achieved it when you have all of those types of freedom. When you want to be where you are, it means that from the unlimited possibilities of where you could be, you get to be the one place you want to be most. That’s not to say that everything is perfect. It’s to say that it’s your choice.

You might not want to spend time in a hospital, but it might be exactly what you want to do to support a family member in need. You might not love that you have to wait in traffic to pick up your kids from school, but it’s a necessary step to be the parent you want to be for your kids. Life is full of tradeoffs, unfortunately we can’t have everything we want at exactly the same time. What we can have though is the specific choice within all those tradeoffs that you believe is best for you.

That’s success - knowing what matters most to you, having the capability to prioritize it over other things, and be there for it. Or at least a version of it!

I really like this definition because it’s one that emphasizes the importance of intentionality. You need both clarity and execution to pull it off. And it doesn’t need to be done at some grandiose scale in order to achieve it. It’s something that exists somewhere in every single moment. You just need to know what it is and choose it over all else.

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