By definition, success is accomplishing an aim or purpose. Success is subjective: to one it is working on Wall Street while to another it's efficiently running a Mr Whippy ice-cream van. Although the two are distant neighbours on the career scale, you gather that regardless of where one falls on the spectrum, success is on everyone's agenda. As a child, success was an entirely different kettle of fish to what it is now. I wanted to be a pizza maker, lollipop lady and bus driver. Those jobs all hold varying levels of accomplishment but in my wise owl years I have learned that if you think out of the box and use what your mama gave you, 'grown-up' success can be ten times bigger than what your younger self assumed. That aside, I would still welcome the notion of flipping dough in the air to Dean Martin's That's Amore.
Cyberspace is crammed with articles on 'how to teach yourself to be the next £100M start-up' and 'how to be a successful women in a man's world', but rather than spend my life plodding through mundane tricks of the trade, I have been lucky to speak first hand with some of London's young entrepreneurial heads; all of whom started from the bottom but now they're here * input an imaginable success monitor sitting at maximum capacity *
Through such hobnobbing and the nature of my creative career I have learned to measure success on my own terms: not my mama's, my peers nor Hillary Clinton's - although I would like a dose of what her mama gave her - in order to fill my hypothetical glass of success. Having talked with the light bulbs behind some of London's most successful start-ups, I recently began to wander: are millennials redefining success compared to their ancestors? Is success more widely spoken of and achieved than our parents generation?
Success doesn't arrive on our doorsteps neatly wrapped with a bow on top; it often takes a lot of hard graft, labour and negotiation to get to a point of glittering success. One can have an ongoing relationship with success; never arriving at what they deem as being successful enough. When I think everything is sailing along in a positive direction, fear strikes when a friend tells me of their promotion or new five storey home in Chelsea. It is not that I want what they are achieving, all of our goals differ in size and shape, but in that moment I feel inadequate about where I am on the monopoly board of life. Let's do a quick show of hands, how many of you can relate to this same feeling? Yes, I thought so. It is with a dollop of cooperation - with myself - that I have decided not to focus on the end result of success and enjoy the process of getting there. Day to day many enter their workplace with resentful hearts and lacklustre heads but luckily that feeling is foreign to me. After years of trying to discover where I should spend the rest of my working days, I found the perfect fit in production and writing about two years ago. The blend of the two offers countless professional pleasures and although I'm not Sofia Coppola or Nora Ephron, yet, I intend to soak up the rewards my chosen career and personal path have given me thus far.
Whether success knocks on your door when you're 18, 27 or 79 years old, I think you should strike while the iron is hot at any opportunity to further your professional success. I'm telling you, don't ignore what you have been both nurtured or destined to do as that gut will not let you down. As I dash off to happily try my hand at tossing pizza dough in the air with the desired company of Mr Martin, I bid you all the success in the world.