I was listening to Michael Caine talk on Desert Island Island Disks this morning.  I am a big fan of his acting, especially in his latter years.  Although he is 19 years older than me, I was a teenager when I saw him burst onto the movie scene as Alfie.   So my years of my growing up and growing older have paced his incredible career via Harry Palmer, the anti-Bond and Charlie Croker in the Italian Job through to a horrible trough of The Swarm.  By the mid-eighties he found his mojo again and made films like Sweet Liberty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  In his later years, when others’ careers might have faded, he has just got better and better in films like Cider House Rules and Secondhand Lions, and he was a perfect Alfred in Batman.  Not bad for a lad from Rotherhithe, the son of a charlady…

So as I was listening to him talking, I wondered why he had been so incredibly successful and wondering what that might be like.  Which took me to the question “Well, are you a success?”   Now that is one heck of a question for 9.0 am on Xmas morning!  By comparison with Sir Michael, it is hard to put oneself in the same category; but then few are.  So… do I feel successful?

Well, on the basis that I have achieved most of the key goals I set myself as younger man, then I guess so.  I may not be a national treasure  but I have three fabulous, healthy children, a wife who (despite it all) sees and loves me, a home I love, and job that fulfils me.  I’m not sure what I’d change, other than perhaps just ‘dialling up the volume a bit’, and that seems a reasonable test of success.

It is a pretty big question.  We all want and need to feel like a success; to be the hero in our own movie.  I’m interested to hear how you would measure success.  It has serious implications for Change in business too, as people will avoid experiencing failure and if your program is not design or managed well enough to give them a reasonable belief that they can succeed they won’t ‘play’, and you will fail.

“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”   Thomas J. Watson

“The successful always has a number of projects planned, to which he looks forward. Anyone of them could change the course of his life overnight.”   Mark Caine