Define Success

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Regardless of what challenges we’re facing, at any given time, we can define success. Success is a better outcome, or movement toward the solution we want to achieve.

By studying CEOs and leaders from all walks of life, I learned the importance of defining success. All leaders aim to find solutions to problems. To begin, they had to identify precisely what they were trying to achieve. That act of defining success shaped the methodical way I approached my life, even while serving my prison term.

In fact, the first module of the Straight-A Guide I created emphasizes defining success. I believed that anyone could build a better life by practicing that principle daily. More than 12 years have passed since I walked out of prison, and this strategy continues to guide me.

I credit my mentor, Lee Nobmann, with inspiring me to write the Straight-A Guide course. Lee often visited me while I was incarcerated. He shared the motivations that led him to build a billion-dollar company, stressing that anyone could replicate similar principles in their own journey—if they were willing to define success clearly.

Early in his career, Lee told me about a conversation he had with Mike, a friend of Lee’s father who owned a competing business. At the time, Lee had one store selling building supplies. He told Mike his vision: someday, he wanted to own ten stores, each generating at least $10 million in annual sales, aiming for $100 million in total revenues.

Mike scoffed, dismissing Lee’s ambition. Mike said to Lee, “Talk is cheap.” 

Yet Lee ignored the negativity. He knew what he wanted, he defined success, and he took methodical steps forward. More than 30 years later, the family-owned business that Lee founded generates over $600 million annually—far surpassing the dreams he spoke of as a young entrepreneur.

During our talks when Lee visited, he asked me how I would define success when I left prison. If I wanted to build a business around the lessons I learned, he encouraged me to create a mechanism to share those lessons. Those conversations planted the seeds for the Straight-A Guide, a course I started to write during my 22nd year of confinement. The course includes ten modules and it combines what I learned from leaders, sharing the strategies that helped me navigate prison and aim for a higher potential.

Ssuccess will mean different things at different stages of our lives. When I read about Socrates from a solitary cell—before I was even sentenced—I realized I had to think differently. At that time, my definition of success meant serving my sentence and returning to society without limitations that would prevent me from realizing my highest potential.

I transitioned from prison to a halfway house in 2012. The foundational strategy of defining success daily remains central to my life. 

As I write this blog now, I define success differently from when I was in a solitary cell, and differently from when I first got out of prison. The incremental progress I made along the way opened new opportunities. I attribute that progress to always beginning a stage by defining success. We should always remember that success isn’t a final destination, but a constantly evolving target. It’s a concept I learned about from reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.


Self-Directed Learning Question

  • How can you define success for your current stage in life, and what small but intentional steps can you take today to ensure you keep moving toward the vision you’ve created for yourself?