SuccessQuest Podcast

In this episode, Kalob and Jacob discuss the term success. We analyze stereotypical definitions of success and talk about how we define it.

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• “70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large financial windfall.” National Endowment for Financial Education

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Dictionary definitions of success:

• “The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”
• “The attainment of popularity or profit.”
• “A person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity.”
• “The outcome of an undertaking, specified as achieving or failing to achieve its aims.”

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SuccessQuest definition of success: Continual progress on all levels.

• Physical
• Emotional
• Intellectual
• Spiritual - 71% of Americans said that their spiritual beliefs are a positive guiding force for them. Time.com - Here’s How Happy Americans Are Right Now
• Financial
• Social - Loneliness can be a greater health risk than smoking Harvard - The pursuit of happiness

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• Failure: An Essential Ingredient of Success

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Jacob Links:

• Jacob’s Website
• Jacob’s LinkedIn
• Jacob's Twitter: @jacob_m_harmon

Kalob Links:

• Kalob’s LinkedIn

SuccessQuest Links:

• Website
• Blog
• Podcast
• Playlist 
• Recommended Books 

Kalob: Hey guys, welcome back to the SuccessQuest podcast. I'm Kalob Valle

Jacob: and I'm Jacob Harmon

Kalob: and for today's episode. We're going to be discussing success and hopefully redefine what success means to the masses and we're going to do this just kind of in a discussion style. So we're going to start with a question. What does the term success mean Jacob?

Jacob: Yeah, I think that when most of us think about success we think of this stereotypical success, right? We think of the doctors the dentist the lawyers that are making a lot of money. We think of the big CEO at the major corporation that it's a multi-millionaire, right? But we're going to kind of explore in this podcast why this might not be exactly true. This might not be what success really is. 

Kalob: Yeah, I like where you're going. You're talking very much about the stereotypical definition of success. This is really what people think generally Across the Nation across the world. That success is largely based off of how much money you're making. Okay. It's very much Financial more than it is anything else and I'm not going to lie being financially free being financially stable wealthy. Those are those are great things okay. It's a part of success but it is not it is a it is incredibly incomplete by itself. Okay, and I want to go right into what Jacob was talking about those stereotypical types of successes like the doctor the CEOs the millionaires. I'm especially thinking of an interesting example with winning the lottery so. People everywhere no matter who you are. No matter what you believe when it'd be so cool to win Millions upon millions of dollars, right? Everyone kind of imagines this everyone kind of wishes for that, you know, somewhere inside and which is why you know, the lottery industry makes a lot of money but winning the lottery if you were to win, Millions of dollars just overnight. Does that make you successful in life? Think about that for a second? Okay. We're I'm trying to prove here that it's not just about being financially free or by being financially stable or wealthy or Rich even okay that this is such a small portion of what it takes to be successful. Now I'm going to go to a statistic really quickly just for the the lottery stuff that I was talking about. And this comes from the National Endowment for financial education. And this is a they posted this January 12 2018. And this this statistic is crazy. It says that 70% of lottery winners people who become millionaires overnight end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large Financial windfall. This is. An insane statistic. Okay. This just not only proves that being wealthy. It's not enough but it kind of just begs the question. What happened there? What do you think Jacob? 

Jacob: I think if you win the lottery you're instantly rich, but. You didn't go through all that work to become rich. It's there's a big difference between receiving it and working for it. When you work for something you actually gain a lot of skills and you learn a lot during that process and that learning is invaluable. If you're just given money. You don't know how to manage it. You don't know how to grow. Whereas if you earn that wealth and you earn that money, not only do you appreciate it because you worked so hard for it, but you also know how to manage it and you know how to make it even more valuable over time.

Kalob: I love that. I want to quickly go over some of the dictionary definitions of success. Okay, and just to kind of show that it really isn't as focused on money as people think it is. One of the first ones the accomplishment of an aim or purpose that's very general. That's very general. You can kind of basically just choose what success is to you in that definition the attainment of popularity or profit. Okay, that's more. That's more money related. Okay popularity. That's interesting. I don't feel like I need to be popular to be successful. But okay, that's a definition a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains Prosperity. That's really cool. Okay. That's that's long term. Okay or the outcome of an undertaking specified as achieving or failing. To achieve its aims that school that talks about the journey to talks about the quest to success which is what we're all about here. Okay. So I really like that definition. Let's go ahead and talk about why these stereotypical views are just false. Okay or incomplete as we wanted to put it earlier.

Jacob: Yeah, I like that you change that to incomplete because I mean going back to that example that we gave at the beginning of the really rich multi-millionaire CEO, right? It is office. He's on top of the world. He is the one in charge he has people that are working for him and that will do anything. He asks, he has assistance in secretaries that take care of him. And he's rich. I mean he's bringing in a lot of money, but let's pull back that curtain a little bit and let's see what's going on in the background of this man's life when he goes home.  Does he have a family does he have a wife that he loves? How's that relationship? Does he have children? Does he spend time with them or is he always at work? Right? Maybe he has a lot of stress and anxiety because he has such a busy life. And he's suffering from something like depression. So just because someone is successful in one facet of their life doesn't make them a successful person. And the hard thing about that is that it's so hard to Define right? We're basically saying that someone who's successful isn't necessarily successful, but I think that the important thing that we're trying to hit here is there's a balance to success. It's not just having money, but it's being a happy person. It's being fulfilled. 

Kalob: I love that. I immediately think. Of a large cake, right? This is a very simple analogy but being financially successful in and of itself is one slice of the cake one slice of the pie. That's it. You want the full pie you want the full cake? Okay granted in real life. We don't want to be eating full cakes. I don't encourage that for anybody. But looking outside of Life what it really means you want the full thing. You want to be the best you that you can be and that is not necessarily limited to being financially stable. Now, I want to actually go into what how we define success. Okay here at SuccessQuest. We know we understand that it's not just about having money not just about having the big house the car the suits the luxuries of life. It's about so much more and I want to talk about that. We define, SuccessQuest defines success as the continual progress. Of success on all levels now, what are those levels? I'm going to let Jacob talk about those. 

Jacob: Yeah, so we've defined six different areas of success and this isn't necessarily an end-all be-all definition. Its going to be changing as we learn but we believe that success can be divided into six groups physical success emotional success intellectual success. Spiritual financial and social success. So those are the six different groups and we're going to talk a little bit about each one, but don't worry in the future. We're going to have entire podcast episodes dedicated to each one of these areas because there's no way we can cover them all in one podcast, but we're just going to talk really quickly about each area and give a overall definition of what we mean by success in that area. So let's start with physical success. 

Kalob: Perfect. Even before I get there. I wanted to mention our definition starts of its continual progress. Okay on all levels. We are not expecting anyone to be perfect in all of these aspects. Okay, we expect people to continually try and I think that's what life is about. It's about constantly trying it's about waking up in the morning and not saying man. I'm a failure. It's about saying man today is a new opportunity to try and improve and be better so. Let's talk about physical success physical success is not just about being a body builder. Okay, and I use that phrase a lot. It's not just being about but it really isn't you don't need to be huge buff go to the gym five hours a day eating five ten meals a day, whatever and have the beautiful body right or the stereotypical beautiful body. Okay, it's not about that. It's it's about getting good sleep. It's about eating healthily. It's about exercising consistently. It's about you. Doing your best to keep up your physical well-being. We made a good analogy when we were talking earlier about our bodies being Vehicles. This is true and we only get one vehicle guys. You only get one vehicle. Are you going to are you going to use that vehicle and put horrible gasoline and oil and and never change it and never clean it like you have to do. Really well with that vehicle and you know, there are there are exceptions right people face major health problems all the time when I was 16. I actually grew up kind of sickly when I was 16. I had to have heart surgery and that impeded my ability to play soccer in high school and that was awful and I wanted to do lots of sports, but you just do what the best with what you can for me. To be physically successful in that time frame of my life. It wasn't about running 10 miles or running one mile. It was about just getting up and doing simple exercises to to get by and that was it until eventually I adapted into a better more elevated style of physical success.  So leading away from physical success. Let's talk about emotional success Jacob. 

Jacob: We've already talked a little bit about our body and a part of our body is our brain and that brain is like the engine of the vehicle that Kalob was just talking about everything we do in our life comes because we decide to do it. Our brain tells us to do it. Right and emotional success is a huge part of that now, Kalob and I are not psychologists. We're not experts in this field and I guarantee you we will have people on this podcast that know a lot more than we do about these topics. The idea behind emotional success is managing your life so that you're not super stressed out so that you're not depressed so that your. You feel fulfilled in your life and you feel connection to other people if you're emotionally in a state where you can think and Achieve success for yourself. That's great. If you're struggling in that area, then that's something you can work on and really quick to go back to what Kalob said earlier. It's about progress if you struggle with something like anxiety or depression or stress. That doesn't make you not successful as long as you're progressing and as long as you're working on those things.

Kalob: And you know this it's a hard topic to talk about in all honesty depression affects a huge majority of Americans a huge majority of people worldwide. It's something we want to take seriously and that's why we want to have a good guest speaker. Come on and be able to talk to you guys about this, but we understand it's hard life is hard and we want to give you guys the tools and resources to be able to. Confront these trials and come out on top. Maybe not every time Everyone Falls every now and then but it's about getting back up continuing on we have intellectual success. I love this one. I think Jacob and I are going to really get into this one because it's just continual learning. Okay being intellectually successful is just constantly striving to learn to learn and to grow. In your knowledge bases reading books. I'm sure everyone has heard this at one point or another in their lives from successful people role models that we should read a book a day who hasn't heard about that. If you haven't now you have and it's kind of a crazy goal to set for yourself, but really truly successful people read books all the time. Okay. I don't know. I don't know how small their books are for them to be able to have the time to read them in one day, but it's about. Continually continually trying to learn and I think that's a really important aspect of success in your life that you're striving to not just stay comfortable with what you know, but looking outwards seeing the progress that we're making us Humanity. We have so many amazing research cases going on right now in America technological advances. It's just incredible and so it's important to continually try to learn with the progress of humanity. Awesome. 

Jacob: Thanks Kalob. And the next area that we're going to talk about is spiritual success. Now. We want to be very clear. We're not telling you you have to be religious. You don't Kalob and I personally we are we're both very religious, but even if you aren't. There is an essential part of being spiritual A study says that 71 percent of Americans say that their spiritual beliefs are a positive guiding force for them. I'll make sure to put a link in the description. So you guys can see this article even if you're not religious you can do things to have a greater purpose in your life when we think of spirituality. We're not just thinking about believing in God, but we're thinking about believe. In a higher purpose having a purpose for your life a direction that you want to put your life in being able to connect with that purpose. So it's more than just religion but we believe that spirituality is an essential element of success. 

Kalob: Yeah in to go off that it's so simple in all honesty. Like I people immediately might get defensive over the word spirituality. But I mean, it's just the beauty of the ability to self-reflect. I really truly think that's what it is self-reflect to meditate to ponder think about your life and your life's goals and put it into perspective. That's really what it is. Okay spirituality is basically. Removing yourself from a situation and being able to look at it from a network perspective and in perfecting that will help you so much in your life. Yeah, we're not going to try and tell people to become religious right even though I personally enjoy my religious views but spirituality as a whole because it is different is so beneficial and then of course, there's financial success financially. We already talked about this it's so. Important to be in a situation where you can take care of your family take care of yourself and focus on the other types of success. We do want to go over the fact that there's a difference between being wealthy and being rich. Okay, we're not talking about being billionaires. We're talking about living within your means. Okay, making just enough, you know passively to be able to continue with your life. That's an amazing goal to become wealthy is one of my goals personally. I want to be able to make. Enough where I don't have to work anymore. I want to make passive income and I think that's an amazing goal to have we also want to talk about reality and giving the charity. These are important aspects of being financially successful. It's not just about becoming rich and stuff. Lastly. We want to talk about social success. 

Jacob: I'm going to read a quote here that's from a Harvard study and it really impacted me when I read it. It says loneliness can be a greater health risk than smoking. Can you believe that Kalob ? Wow, that's crazy. The Harvard study found a strong connection between happiness and close relationships with a spouse family and friends. Wow. Okay. So this goes back to that CEO, right his family life was struggling. Even though he was super super wealthy and super super rich. Guess what you have to focus on what's most important in my life my wife and my daughter and soon-to-be son. Probably any day now, they are the most important thing to me.  And you have to remember that sometimes when we're on this Quest For Success. It's really easy to put them on the back burner, right? Kalob and I have been working on this business for a few months now and it's consumed a lot of my thoughts it's consumed a lot of my time. I've been really focused on SuccessQuest and trying to organize this information and build a website and created podcasts. But guess what it's important that during all of that time. You don't leave behind what's most important in your life your family. Your friends having a social life is important and it's essential for happiness and success. 

Kalob: I agree and I hope that everyone is well off with their families and with their friends, but reality is a lot of us have ties that are struggling relationships that are struggling social success is being able to look at those ties and decide whether or not it's worth fixing. Being able to figure out how to fix a relationship with a father with a mother with siblings with friends or how to end relationships that can be toxic. We want to talk about all those things and these are the types of success. We want to talk about physical emotional intellectual spiritual financial and social and there are more and I'm sure we're going to discover more eventually but these are some of the main probably most important subcategories for success and I just want to. Reiterate what we talked about earlier that overall it's about having the ability to get up when you fall the best way to define success is to just continually try always try work on we're going to fail we're going to make mistakes. The good thing is we can everyday have the opportunity to do better and improve on ourselves and. I think that's the the reason I wake up every morning. So happy I am a very positive person by nature. But I love thinking that you know, maybe yesterday I made this mistake, but I can and I've made a lot of mistakes in my life and it's easy to regret but at the end of the day, those are the things that hold you back the most and we want to be able to help you not only understand these different types of success, but understand above all that is long as you try. That's all that matters. That's all that matters. It's something that Jacob said earlier was was really cool. 

Jacob: So when we were talking before we even recorded this podcast we were just planning it out and you know those financial charts that you look at when you're looking at a stock market chart and it shows you how the stock is going up and down there's a lot of Rises but there's also a lot of Falls the stock is constantly going up and down. What matters is that over time? It's going up. There's gonna be bad days. There's going to be times where you are unsuccessful where you fail.  But what's important is that you're progressing what's important is that your general trend is Improvement that you're getting better in these areas. And that's what we want to teach here at SuccessQuest. It's not about never failing. It's about learning from failure. It's about. Getting better over time. All right, well to finish off her podcast. We've asked a few of our listeners to answer the question. What does success mean to you? Let's hear what they have to say.  

Guest: I would define success as balance. We all aspire to succeed in many areas. We work. We have family some of us religion health. And educational or really Hobbies any Pursuits that we can think of that that matter the problem is.  doing well in each of those without you know, putting too much time into one at the cost of another.  

Guest: You know when I think about success I think about a road like a road that has a lot of different stops. But you have to take that road to be able to get there. So to me success is the ability to get on that road and be able to travel down that road and be able to accomplish your destination of getting to where you wanted to go. What matters is that along the way? Along the road along the path you're going to find yourself either and a smooth ride or your may get a flat tire or you may get a lot of obstacles that come your way and you have to deal with those obstacles to get your goal. And that's life in life to me. My success is my family and my children to for them to be able to. Accomplish their dreams their aspirations, but at the same time be close to God. I feel very comfortable at nine that even though money is important. That is not how I measure my success. There's no the size of the house is it is not how much credit I have. It is not how much it has nothing to do much with material things to me success has everything to do with a personal feeling of accomplishment. 

Guest: To me success is having balance in life. There are a lot of things we can focus on and a lot of areas that all of us want to do well, but I think the ultimate measure of success is how well you balance each one of those areas and creating a balanced life.

Guest: Success to me is some you'll progress. The way to find success the how or is by I love loving others.  Creating good relationships surrounding yourself by good people. I believe that by doing this you'll find happiness in your life will find fulfillment in your life. And naturally you will progress and you will find success. 

Guest: Success is accomplishing a task or overcoming a fear that once held you back 

Guest: I view successes having meaningful and loving family relationships being able to use my Knowledge and Skills to benefit Society at large and ultimately just being in a position where I can serve others.

Guest: To me success means going to bed every night feeling like I accomplished something worthwhile. Even if it's something small like having done the dishes or you know stayed home and took care of my child all day. That is something worthwhile to me. And as long as I'm adding value to the world rather than. Being strictly a consumer. I feel successful that day. I feel like I've accomplished something great. And I think that's the key to having a successful life. 

Jacob: Wow, thank you so much to everyone who sent in an audio comment. It's something we're going to try to do a lot on this show. We really want to hear from the community. We don't want to just be talking to a wall but we want you guys to be participants in this. So if you ever have anything to to say that you. Put on the podcast. Feel free to send it our way, and we'd be happy to incorporate it into a show whether that be a question or a comment or honestly anything related to success. We'd love to hear from you. 

Kalob: I love that. Hey guys, you guys have been so awesome. I'm so glad that all of you guys had the chance to hear this podcast in the future. Our next podcast are going to be really meaty. Okay, they're going to be really juicy. We're going to actually dive into these different types of success. We want to get some guest speakers out here. I don't want you guys to miss this. So thank you for listening to this episode. Make sure to subscribe rate US follow us on Facebook Instagram anything you got to do to keep us apart of your daily life a positive motivation for forward progression towards your success in the future. I'm so thank you have a successful day. Super awesome. You guys are the best. Whoo.