What is success? Is it what most people think it is: fame, money, social status, and an enviable job? Well, it can be. But, obviously, life success is for you to determine. There are plenty of people who, to quote Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction, “walk the Earth” and live fulfilling lives. There are plenty of other people who work the bare minimum to provide for their families and then spend the rest of the time with them. There are plenty of people who simply want to do drugs and party (see: Chelsea Handler). But how do you know what success is for you and, more importantly, how do you know you’re on the right path? That’s the purpose of this post.
While you can strive to do, be, or have anything you want in life, I have found that people who say that and nothing else are not helping the indecisive people in this world. That’s what I’m here for: giving you actionable guidance but not telling you exactly what to do, thus balancing between the “you can do anything” crowd and the “you must do X or you’re a failure” crowd. The good news is that while there are a theoretically infinite number of goals you might have, most goals fit into a moderately long list of categories. Here’s a short list of the top categories as an example:
There are more, but you get the gist—there are only so many kinds of things you can do with your life and, therefore, you can evaluate the categories for ideas of the types of goals you might have within each that you can strive for. For example, you might want the “American Dream” set of goals: a spouse, 2-3 children, a pet, a car or two, a house, a well-paying job, and social bonds within the community. That’s a fine set of goals that cut across the main categories. Alternatively, you might be hyper-focused on one goal: winning a Super Bowl. In that case, you might dedicate a disproportionate amount of time on your physical abilities and skills to play NFL football—fortunately, these days, that also pays very well and, therefore, helps with the relationship, kids, house, and other potential goals you might have. Or you might carve out your unique off-the-beaten-path goals like maximizing your freedom (e.g., living “off grid”) or traveling the world with just a backpack and a day-to-day itinerary. You can craft the set of goals that work for you.
But the point of this blog post is not to focus too much on the goals themselves: it’s about how you know you’re on the path to success, also known as how to know you’re succeeding. And that’s where the idea of “leading indicators” comes in. For those of you not familiar with the term, a leading indicator is something that occurs before the final outcome that suggests that you are on track toward achieving the outcome. For example, if you want a high-paying corporate job, one leading indicator of working toward that is getting a degree (e.g., high school diploma, bachelor’s degree). You haven’t gotten the high-paying corporate job yet, but by developing the skills you need in school and graduating, you greatly increase your chances. That’s what a leading indicator is: some milestone, metric, or intermediate outcome that doesn’t necessarily guarantee the final result but definitely increases your probability of attaining the outcome or demonstrates progress toward that result.
So what are leading indicators of success in life? Well, the obvious one is your sense of purpose and fulfillment. Fulfillment is both a leading and lagging indicator, as you can feel fulfilled on the way toward your goal but will maximize your fulfillment at the point of attainment (note that life goes on, so your fulfillment might go down a little again afterwards as you find your next goal to strive for). But having a sense of purpose is a great leading indicator, as it maximizes in the early and middle part of your journey and, strangely, at the point of greatest fulfillment switches to purpose attained and not having one to work toward, so it’s somewhat negatively correlated with fulfillment (i.e., as your purpose is realized, your fulfillment goes up and purpose goes down; as you get a new one, your fulfillment goes down and your purpose goes up).
While those are two primary ones you might use because they’re universal, there are plenty of others you can use for specific goals. For example, if your goal is financial success, your two leading indicators are salary (current and near-future) and savings/investments levels. Financial services institutions do this all the time by tracking your salary and desired savings/income at retirement and tell you if your retirement savings are on track toward your target, suggesting you increase, maintain, or possibly decrease your savings rate to hit your target.
That’s the value of a leading indicator: it tells you in advance whether you are on track toward success. Lagging indicators (the name for indicators that are looking backward at success/failure of something in the past) are not as helpful for course corrections because they usually point toward things you can’t change anymore. For example, if you waited to view your retirement savings until the year you planned on retiring, your whole career just went by and there’s no way to change your behavior to make up the deficit—especially if it’s huge. But with leading indicators, you can predict future success and adjust long before the final result occurs. Leading indicators in life include your skills and skill levels, your education levels, your current income and savings, your career trajectory (i.e., how much more money can you make if you stay in the field and get promoted every few years—and how often are you getting promoted), your grades or GPA (grade-point average) in school, your relationship health, your bloodwork results during your annual physical (meaning things like your cholesterol levels, blood pressure, weight, etc.), and your consistency in practicing or exercising. Lagging indicators include your final retirement savings, your college degree, championship wins, credit card debt (lagging because that money is already spent—though, like salary, it can be a leading indicator of things getting worse, too!), and your current home ownership or relationship status (i.e., being married).
So what’s the point of figuring out your life’s leading indicators? Well, it helps you make good life decisions now for better outcomes in the future. That’s the benefit. I always joke that you’ll only truly know whether you’ve made a good choice of major in college 5 or 10 years after you graduate when you’re mid-career and you are happy with where you are. But you don’t just guess your major at random, shrug your shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess I’ll find out for sure in 10 years whether I picked correctly!” No, you research jobs you can get with that degree, their salaries, their duties, their career paths, etc., and then you ask yourself whether you believe that you would be happy if that was your job, your salary, your career path, etc. in 10 years. If the answer is, “Yes!” then that’s a good leading indicator that you’re on the right track. If you’re unsure, then it’s possible that you need more information or that it’s the wrong track. That’s the power of a leading indicator: getting feedback now as to whether you are going in the right direction so you don’t go so off track that many years later you have to completely change everything in your life. Issues identified and resolved today require exponentially less effort than issues needing to be resolved years from now (i.e., that’s why the saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” exists).
So how do you move forward with this information? Simple: Take the success categories listed above (as well as others you can think of—that’s not a complete list), identify and define success for you in those areas, and then figure out what the final outcome would look like (that would be your lagging indicator because either you’d attain it or you wouldn’t) and what progress would look like (those are your leading indicators because you still have time to change your behavior to get back on the right track if you run into hurdles). Then, you can monitor your leading indicators to keep yourself on track toward your ultimate goals.
Two quick, commonplace examples: exercise and learning a new language. If you want to improve your physique or fitness, you need to regularly exercise your body. So the leading indicators might be how frequently you go to the gym, how long you train for, and how hard you train. If those numbers are not high enough to make the progress you want/need to make to succeed, then that’s a leading indicator that you need to change your behavior before you risk failing. Similarly, when learning a new language, your final goal might be to speak conversationally in the language, but your leading indicators are how many words you know, how often you study or practice, and possibly even how comfortable you feel traveling to a country that only speaks that language (i.e., your feelings/emotions are your build-in life indicators, which I discuss in detail in other posts). The final goal is the ultimate measure of success for yourself, but the leading indicators are arguably even more important because they keep you on track toward your goal, whereas the binary “success/failure” final assessment is useless at worst or at best not reflective of the real growth you achieved through the experience (just ask anyone who had a major failure in their lives that led to huge success later—just judging your life as success/failure is not a fair evaluation when you can turn every life experience into a growth opportunity).
So keep both kinds of indicators in mind for when you set goals in your life: what’s the final outcome, and how do you know you’re on the path to attaining it? While the former is what you think you’re shooting for, not only is the latter more useful along the way, but it’s also a better indicator of whether your living with purpose, direction, and meaning. The lagging indicators might be measures of success, but leading indicators of measures of being successful. And, as any family member will tell you, they are just as proud—if not more—of you being successful than of your success. The fact that your parents raised a person who lives life in a way that enables them to thrive is a much more rewarding and longer-lasting feeling than just that short duration of a big accomplishment. So don’t just track the final result—continuously assess that you’re making progress in life, and you’ll be much more fulfilled and successful along the way.