Declare Victory

What does professional success look like to you?  Making $50,000 a year? $500,000 a year? $5 million a year? What schools do you need to attend? What degrees must you attain? What neighborhood must you live in? What private schools and summer camps do your kids need to attend? What car should you drive? What weight must you be? How many countries must you visit? We all have an idea of what success looks like. 

But many of us believe that we dictate the terms of our own success. If we reflect on it, however, we may come to realize that our definition of success is heavily influenced by expectations that others—whether family, friends, or society—have imposed upon us. We all have barometers that are calibrated to expectations that accumulate from childhood and include influences from our immediate environment and broader cultural norms.

Sometimes we meet or exceed these benchmarks. This tends to be very gratifying. People around us acknowledge our success; the shiny new car, the fancy house, our advanced degrees, or our designer clothes. All of this social feedback, in our minds, reinforces what “victory” looks like. Then you encounter others who share these same benchmarks—our peer group who we identify and interact with—and these benchmarks turn from an aspiration to an expectation.

I enjoy setting ambitious goals for myself. I like to think they’re largely self-imposed, but I’m well aware that my upbringing and my environment heavily influence my aspirations. Sometimes I meet these goals, other times I fall short. We may be inclined to think that when we don’t hit the mark or make the cut, we should be resigned to failure. We should just admit it, “I failed. I flopped. I couldn’t make the grade.” It may hurt, but at least we’re being honest, right?

I’m here to tell you, there’s another option. Instead of resigning yourself to failure, to admitting defeat, do the opposite: Declare victory.

I recently ran the New York City Marathon as part of a charitable program to support a children’s hospital. Without fail, every person I talked to asked me how fast I was aiming to run the race. What was my goal pace? What was my PR time? Then I’d invariably hear stories about other people who ran the New York City Marathon much faster. So-and-so ran it in 3:19 with a broken toe and food poisoning. Otherwise, he would have broken 3 hours.

The day I ran the race, the conditions were challenging. It was hot. It was humid. There were interspersed showers, dropping just enough rain to keep my socks and shoes wet. I’ve run three Boston Marathons, and I’d never truly hit the wall at mile 20 until I ran the New York Marathon. The last six or so miles were a slog. And although I finished the race, it was the slowest race I’ve ever run—by far.  

After the race, I needed a full thirty minutes to regain enough of my balance that I could wobble back to my hotel. Many runners would view this race as a failure. I missed my mark by well over an hour and spent the final miles holding on for the finish. This doesn’t sound like the making of a victory, especially for someone who has run multiple marathons in much faster times. But to me, it was easy to declare victory. I’d never run the NYC Marathon, so just finishing the race was a meaningful accomplishment. I also had the opportunity to see and experience all five boroughs of New York City in an intimate fashion. There’s nothing like running through a neighborhood to really get a sense of its culture, its flavor, and vibes. 

To me this was a victory all the way around—and I’m holding on to it, even if others might see me as having come up short.

I’ve declared victory a number of times in my life when others would not have. This has enhanced my appreciation of these experiences and set me up for future success. Though I never leveraged my engineering degree to launch a dedicated career as an engineer, I did find ways to put the discipline to work in powerful ways. To me, that’s a victory. Though I spent nearly a decade in medical training only to pivot into the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital, I didn’t see my deviation from clinical medicine as a failure. Instead, I declared victory. I got what I wanted out of the experience and was able to transfer what I learned to make an impact on humanity in ways that were more authentic to myself and truer to my passions and talents.

When taking on new endeavors, when outcomes are uncertain, reserving the option to declare victory can be particularly valuable. The process of writing and publishing my first book has been a harrowing one. All the formal steps—the book proposal, querying agents, locking up a book publisher, the parameters for the book, and the sales and distribution process—are all unfamiliar to me. As I divulged my aspirations to publish a book to some people close to me, it didn’t take long for the notion of a New York Times bestseller to creep into the discussion. Whoa! Slow down. Approximately 1 million books are published and self-published every year. 50 or so become bestsellers. The odds that a first-time author will publish a bestseller are like winning the lottery.

But people assume that if you achieve a certain level of success in one facet of your life that any other pursuit in your life requires the same caliber of accolades. If you’re a great surgeon and you play chess, well, you must be a master. If you’re a successful actor, you’ll be a great politician. And if you’re a successful entrepreneur, you must be a bestselling writer. Of course, I hope that people will enthusiastically embrace my book, but I know there are many outcomes of writing that will lead me to declaring victory. 

Here’s the key: this mindset is the asset in my back pocket that allows me to undertake new, exciting adventures while knowing that outcomes can be highly divergent. It allows me to take risks, try new things, and explore the many dimensions of a worthwhile life without fear of failure. That’s a very real superpower.

I’m guessing that each of us have outcomes that we’ve interpreted as losses, flops, or failures when, in fact, there was an opportunity to declare victory. Allow yourself the luxury of seeing whatever you produced as a victory—both in and of itself, and for what it enables in the long run. This doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards or refrain from striving for higher goals. It simply means that in the final analysis, when the score is tallied, you may be better off seeing what you achieved as a victory rather than a loss. This mindset will not only inspire you to take on more and greater challenges, it will also reinforce the fact that life is more about the journey than the destination. If you find meaning in the journey, the destination is always a victory.