Happiness means success to me. But I'm also happy when I feel relevant; not just in my professional life, but also in my personal life.

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If I can spend 15 minutes removing an obstacle for my team and the rest of the team can cumulatively save an hour in happiness & subsequent productivity, then I'm winning, they're winning and WooThemes is winning.

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As we'd all expect: having a new baby changes your life. I guess that bit was expected for me and I kinda settled into my own comfort zone of perceptions during Jeanne's pregnancy last year. What I didn't expect is how this would completely change me.

I'm typing this with Adii Jr strapped to me chest in his sling; "we" (it took me a little while and 2 cups of coffee longer) have been up since 5:30 in what has now become our default morning routine.

If you told me before Adii Jr's birth that I'd be waking up at 5:30 / 6:00 every morning - without the option to sleep in every now & again - I would've scoffed at you. I've always been an early riser, because I love the first 2 / 3 hours in the morning for productive work, but being my own boss I also had the option of sleeping in if I needed or wanted. 

The thing that has however surprised me is how these couple of hours every morning have become one of the most special parts of my day and if I didn't get that time to spend with Adii Jr, then I feel a little bummed throughout the day. There's just something special about peering down to my chest to see a beautiful baby peacefully sleeping, whilst I catch up on everything that I didn't get to work through the day before.

These are new emotions & experiences to me and what it's made me realize is that my work-life balance has been mostly crap in the last couple of years. It always felt that I needed to run from the one to do, to the next and it even sometimes felt that "time at home", "go out with friends" etc. felt like to do's rather than stuff that I wanted to do.

I'm slowly learning that sometimes it is okay for me to just spend time with Adii Jr: no computer, no iPhone, no TV. I'm learning that slowing down is a good thing and that I don't need to compromise on my ambitions & dreams to be able to do that.

Every now & again, it's okay to just take a moment, spend it with someone special and truly cherish it without having to worry about the next item on the to do list.

Reading through Ben's post, from which I've extracted the above quote, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of what he said. The quote above made me stop reading though and I found myself unsure of whether I actually believed that.

Why did I consider myself an entrepreneur? Did I start a business to make money?

Regardless of my definition of success, I'd have to agree with that; I definitely didn't start a business not to make money. I know that I've never been able to motivate myself with the potential lure of money and that's not why I come to work every morning. But it would be an outright lie if I said I didn't believe that I would profit financially from starting my own business.

I think this borders on my opinion that the execution of any ideas includes the actual monetization thereof. I would definitely consider myself a failure had a I started a business - even if it was for non-financial reasons - and then I failed to profit from it.

More importantly though, I believe I'm an entrepreneur because I want to be involved with building sustainable businesses. There's obviously an element of "money" involved in that and to be sustainable one needs to be profitable, but the initial aim of creating a sustainable business versus making money sits more comfortably with me.

And once you have created something sustainable, the other "nice things" that Ben mentions (having fun, changing the world, disrupting an industry, creating jobs) comes into play: having a sustainable platform to explore, where money isn't the only consideration.

I woke up this morning thinking about how blessed I am to actually love my job. That thought process led me to think about success and how I - in the context of being an entrepreneur - define success for myself.

From the top of my head, I guess success could be defined as any (or a combination of) the following:

• Profitability or the more precisely, the extend thereof (I drive a Porsche, so I'm successful).
• The freedom of working for yourself and doing a job that you love / find challenging.
• (Alarmingly) mainstream tech media sometimes seem to believe that raising funding equals success.

Faced with the challenge of defining success for myself, I'm reminded of a quote (unattributed as far as I know) that my wife once shared with me:

The true definition of success is when you stop making excuses for yourself.

For me this has always been one of the most difficult things, because we are wired to measure things relative to each other. And that's how we measure our personal success, or are at least tempted to do so.

John Wooden gave this fascinating talk about success at TED back in 2001 and he basically says that success is only relative to yourself & whether you gave your best (paraphrasing massively there). In my mind, this thinking gets me closer to what my own definition of success may  be. 

Towards the end of last year, Chris Brogan published an article "That Sense of Overnight Success" which included this striking paragraph (as his definition of success):

Success, you see, isn’t a mansion and a yacht. Success is living the life you want and doing the work you’re best at doing with the people you know will help you reach the next level. Success means working on projects that you know will fulfill a deep felt passion within you, and yet, will feed your family. Success is knowing that you’ve built a thriving network of people who all work hard to grow each other’s capabilities. Success means finding a next angle and vectoring your efforts towards growing that out. Success means having the means and capability to make better decisions. Success means getting home in time for dinner. Success means leaving the house when I want to, and staying home with the kids when I want to, all while making a future for my family.

I  specifically bolded one line in that paragraph about coming home for dinner, because that really resonates with me. I really, really love my job (it has never felt like one) and I'm a passionate entrepreneur, always on the look out for the next big growth spurt or adventurous marketing campaign. One of my favourite things though, is coming home to my wife and an amazing home-cooked dinner.

My peers would probably / generally regard me as being successful and they'd probably base that perception on the reputed size of WooThemes, the house that I live, the holidays I take and perhaps the fact that I get to work for myself. My definition of success is slightly different though.

Success for me is having the opportunity to work on something I love and be allowed to build a business around that. There's a little bit of success in the knowledge that every decision I have to make isn't influenced by money as the determining factor. More so, money can't buy time and success to me means I have the freedom to spend my time on the important things in my life (home, my wife, family, friends). Success is the opportunity to shape my life to find the best fit for my natural personality. Success is making my own rules (for myself & the things over which I exert control) and not making excuses for those decisions. Success is the opportunity just to be me and feel content about that. (I guess too that this will soon change with a baby on the way...)

What is your definition of success?