Biran makes a point that’s easy to nod along to and hard to actually do: you need to define your own success. Not in a vague, aspirational way, but as a genuine answer to the question ‘what does success mean to me, specifically, in this role, right now?’
The reason this matters is that whatever position you’re in, whether it’s a new job, a promotion, a research role, or becoming a parent, there is no shortage of people with an opinion on how you should be doing it. Your manager has expectations. So do your stakeholders, your team, your peers, your clients if you’re self-employed, your family. Even parenting comes with expectations from wider society about how you’re supposed to balance things. Biran points out that if you don’t know what’s meaningful to you, you’ll start living according to everyone else’s expectations instead of your own.
What happens when you skip this step
The cost isn’t abstract. Biran lays out a fairly direct chain: without your own definition of success, you’re never sure whether you’re doing well enough. That uncertainty becomes insecurity. And insecurity, left to sit there, leads to underperformance.
This lands hard for the people we work with, many of whom are mid-career professionals and academics juggling other people’s metrics of success, publication counts, promotion criteria, performance reviews, on top of their own private sense of what actually matters to them. Without a personal definition to check against, it’s easy to end up chasing everyone else’s scoreboard and feeling like you’re losing, no matter what you achieve.
Where confidence comes in
Biran connects this straight back to confidence. If you know what you stand for, what you’re good at, and where your weaknesses genuinely are, you can build a plan around that. And crucially, you can decide for yourself whether you’re doing well, rather than outsourcing that judgement to whoever happens to be watching.
We’ve written before about navigating leadership transitions, and this idea sits right alongside that: the first weeks or months in a new role are exactly when other people’s expectations are loudest, and exactly when you most need your own definition of success to hold onto.
Take a few minutes this week to write down, plainly, what success actually looks like to you in your current role, separate from what your manager, your team or anyone else expects. See how closely it matches what you’ve been measuring yourself against.
Be sure to check out more from Biran at: Biran’s website and Biran’s LinkedIn.
