We Recreate Our Reputation Every Day

I’m not so wildly successful that I have the authority to comment, but I’ve observed that people view success through the wrong lens. Many people treat success as a destination to achieve or a line in the sand to cross, whereas it more appropriately should be considered as a state to be maintained.

But even beyond that, the people who are the most successful don’t get complacent with sustaining a certain level of performance or results. They’re hungry to grow upon it and push the boundary for themselves.  

They know that their last play is in the past. They can’t rely on past success to drive present results. They understand that we recreate our reputation on a moment by moment basis in the way we continue to show up. Rory Vaden puts it this way: “Success is never owned. It’s rented, and the rent is due every day.”

So what does that mean? Well, if we consider success as a form of result, we know that it requires certain inputs to create certain outputs. Understanding that our daily choices and actions are in our control, and not the outcomes, a commitment to the process is the engine that drives results.

It involves having high-performance habits in your health and work-life. It’s maintaining clarity on what’s most important and cutting out distractions that compromise the quality of your attention. It’s enforcing higher standards for yourself in the way you interact with others and the boundaries you set. It’s executing your routines with consistency. 

This all ensures that you make the right choices, and take the right actions, feeding the right inputs into the machine so that it creates the right outputs. And not just doing it once, but following through on it with quality every single day. 

That’s how we recreate our reputation every day. You can’t let past performance and success give you permission to make excuses or compromises. Life is hectic and people move on quickly. If you don’t keep moving forward with it you’re going to be left behind no matter who you used to be.

So be committed to your growth as a process. Understand that success is more a daily discipline than it is a status or achievement. And what happens when you focus on this internal engine is it carries you to the external recognition you’re more accustomed to using as your metric for success. And when you get there, you’ll be more inspired than ever to bring it back to the basics and earn it all over again, every day.