Daily Lab: How to measure success

Business owners and solopreneurs are great at many things and terrible at one thing in particular: Celebrating success.

Because, let’s face it, it rarely feels like success.

When something good happens, it often just reminds us of what needs to be done next—or the ways in which it wasn’t quite as good as we were hoping.

But that’s deadly for a business.

The entrepreneur’s motivation is the most important and most limited resource of any business. Once that runs out, the whole thing stops.

So here’s a way to measure success to stay motivated and stay on track:

Let’s say something good has happened, like you just got a new project from a great client, or you absolutely nailed that last sales call.

Grab a piece of paper or open a text document and write down What happened. It could be as simple as, “Absolutely nailed the sales call with XYZ Business.”

Then, write down How it happened—what did you do to make it happen? Maybe you were patient, calm, and asked thoughtful questions on the call and that’s what made it go so well. Write that down.

Finally, write down Why it happened—what principle can you derive from your behavior and its outcome that you can repeat going forward? In this sales call example, it might be something like, “Ask, don’t tell.”

Do this every time something good happens and, pretty soon, you’ll have a written record of your accomplishments, coupled with a list of principles that have led to those successes.

That’s how you measure success.

Instead of comparing your success against your competition, your peers, your past, or your future, you record it right here in the present.

Success becomes something you experience every time you write a note to yourself, and every time you remind yourself of the principles that got you here.

That’s the kind of success that feels like success.

And, even better than that, it makes you more successful because you’re keeping a list of why you’ve been successful in the past.

So, start measuring this way, and see what success can feel like.

[More on this topic: “What happened, how it happened, why it happened”]