How to be successful in life and what does it look like?

Amanda, success can take many different forms; you can be financially successful, emotionally successful, family-wise successful, personally successful, the list goes on. Everyone has their own personal definition of what it means to be successful, everyone places different emphasis on different aspects of life. Examine your own definition, how do you define success? Five years down the line, where do you want to see yourself? What do you want to see yourself doing in five years? By answering these questions and other questions like the above you will be better able to define your goals and "plot" your life course.

You will need to focus on stress and time management. In order to manage stress you have to manage your time wisely. <span style="background-color: transparent;">You have to set a routine for yourself and stick to it for the most part. Once you get into the groove of a routine it will be much easier for you to manage your time and have enough time for everything you need to do (including relaxing). Make yourself to-do lists on a weekly basis, use Google calendar or a planner to keep track of events, deadlines, and due dates. In addition to setting a routine and sticking to it, plan out relaxing activities into your day. Or set aside a time, after everything is done for the day, that you can have "me" time. I have also personally found it essential to not only find time for myself but also make use of that time in a way that is best for me and my holistic wellness. I have found the HeadSpace app to be an essential tool in helping me relax and generally feel more relaxed throughout the day, Guided meditation, even if you have a busy schedule, will make you feel more at ease and relaxed throughout the day as a whole (not just when you have the time to relax and focus on that "me" time).</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent;">Set a routine.Use Google Calendar.Set aside Me TimeWrite weekly to-do lists and use a planner.Find a peaceful and restful activity that will help you feel relaxed.</span>

Hi Amanda! This is a very broad question :)

The very first thing you must do is to understand what is success to you. Is it really to have a enormous house and fancy clothes? Or is it to have a big family? Or, maybe, it could be know as many people as you can and travel all the world?

You see: there are too many possibilities of success. You must find what success like to you, and only to you.

Don't rely on movies, TV shows or ads to serve you as a "model of success". Not even rely on friends (maybe neither on your family) to shape your success model. It must be something really personal.

No one can be happy all the time, so you shouldn't project such a success model. But you definitely should look for things that would make you happy most of time.

What do you care the most? Which are the things that truly make you happy? And of those, which last longer?

It's a common mistake when we are young, to define a "success life" as a life of wealth and properties. But I have a couple of friends and they do think they have a success life being volunteers and helping abandoned animals or homeless people, and they are far from being rich or anything like it. And some others that are all about having great houses, nice cars, fancy clothes and all that.

Personally, I could learn about my "success life model" about 10 years ago. And I believe I have a success life now. I have a good house, a family that I love (especially my wife and daughter), a job that I like and I travel to a different country once in awhile. I like to give back either here in Career Village or in my hometown and I love to go out with my family to good restaurants a couple times per month. But that's me :) As you can notice, it's different from my friends that are actively on the streets helping homeless people and from my friends that are all about money.

Finally, you have to understand that to achieve your "success life", you will need to give up certain things. Being on the streets helping poor people will challenge you to have a "simple life" dealing with tough realities daily. But you also will have the satisfaction to change someone's life. To be rich, you will need to work a lot, and probably will not have too much time for fun before you actually get rich.... You need to understand which kind of things you are willing to give up and which you are not.

I'm sorry for the long text, but this is a very complex question :) Hopefully, I could give you a thought about how did I managed it and maybe inspired you to find your real success model. All the best to you!