In my last post, I talked about what I personally feel is the secret formula to success – it’s all about hard work combined with what you’re passionate about, then working on that for a long enough time with persistence.

But then something occurred to me… what is success? Achieving goals? Doing what you love? Freedom? Happiness? I went out to some of the leading internet marketing thought-leaders (during my quest to putting together my published book, eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires) and asked them…

“What Do You Define As Success?”

Jermaine Griggs, Founder of HearandPlay.com

“I think I’m 80 percent or 70 percent there. I listen to Deepak Chopra. Success is when you achieved where you want to be in every element of your life. Success is different for everybody. Billionaire status, that success is Donald Trump. If he ever became a millionaire, he’d be a failure to himself. But to some people, just earning six-figures is success.

So it’s all relative to different people if you will. If Bill Gates woke up with Donald Trump’s money, he’d probably kill himself. It’s all relative. If I ever went back to making $200 per month, that’d be very bad. But there are a lot of people out there who’d love to make an extra $500 per month online.

Success is all relative to where you want to be when you predetermine that this is where I want to be in every element of my life. It’s not only just money. Money is just a part of it. Now money-wise, I’ve gotten to places I wanted to be and there are other goals I’ve set for future areas of my life.

But health, that’s another part of it, and that’s something I strive to do every day. I don’t go to the gym as much. I want to go to the gym more. That’s why I said I don’t believe I’m 100 percent at the success area because I know I need to be at the gym three times a week. I’m a slim guy; I’m gaining a little weight since the marriage and the baby and stuff – most fathers know how that works. But when I get to that point, I move up in the success ladder.

Relationships – I want to make sure I have the most fulfilling relationship. I want to make sure that I don’t go down that path that half of Americans do and get a divorce. That’s a part of success. I know of billionaires who have had four wives. I don’t know them but I’ve read of their stories. There are millionaires who can’t stay married and forsake their children, who don’t have time. So success is also defined by personal relationships. I can’t say I’m the best in that area, but I’m striving to be there.

So success to me is not just financial, it’s body, it’s health, it’s soul, it’s spirit, it’s relationships, it’s every element of your life. You can be rich but if you’re Scrooge in that old Christmas Carol story where nobody likes you and you’re so grumpy, why have wealth? Why have the money if you can’t enjoy other areas of your life?

So money is just a means to do your passions and what you love, and be able to travel and things like that. I always keep that in mind when I’m stressing myself out or taking on too much. Is this really success? Or am I just on the move? Am I just busy?

Busy-ness and business, they sound the same, but they’re totally different things. You can be busy but that doesn’t mean you have a business. I’d rather have something that allows me the means to fulfill all these other areas of my life because if the money is taking care of me, yes, I can focus on family. Half of the people don’t have good relationships because they’re stressed out trying to pay bills.

Well, if I got that handle, great, I can move on. I can have fulfilling relationships, and go on vacations, and get my health, and make sure I’m not stressed out. I don’t want to be one of these people who are dying at 50 years old. So I think I’m close to there, but like my grandma would say, “I’m not where I want to be, but I’m thankful I’m not what I used to be.”“

Tom Beal, VP of MikeFilsaime.com:

“Success is different for everybody. It’s a mindset. The best definition I’ve heard is from Earl Nightingale, who said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy idea or goal.” That means that as long as you’re taking steps progressively each day, you’re a success. That’s the whole enjoying-the-journey concept.

To have success defined as, “I’ll be successful when I get this kind of car, this kind of house, this kind of relationship and this kind of health,” you’re setting yourself up to be not be happy in the now. I heard someone, I think it was Zig Ziglar, say, “The more appreciative you can be of the things you have today, the more things you’ll have to be appreciative of tomorrow.”

It’s an attitude of gratitude. The more things you can find in your life to be appreciative for today opens up the door for you to be more appreciative for the great things that are coming your way tomorrow. I don’t think I could be any more successful today, and that doesn’t mean there’s no adversity. That doesn’t mean there’s no chaos or difficulty. It’s just a mindset of handling that chaos or difficulty.

How can I put it? W. Clement Stone, one of the people who financed Napoleon Hill in the early 1900s, the billionaire insurance person from the 1900s, just passed away recently in 2002 at 100 years old. Whenever a problem was brought to him, all of his business associates were freaking out.

They’d go, “Here’s the problem.” W. Clement Stone would say, “That’s great.” They’d all look at him weirdly, because he would find what was great about that problem. Go and do what Tony Robbins says, “Don’t focus on the problem. Focus on the solution.”

Spend most of your time on the solution, not most of your time on the problem, because you become what you think about. If you think about problems, you’ll become a problem. If you think about solutions, you’ll become a solution. It’s the old seek and you shall find. Right now, I would say I personally feel so successful.

We could talk about Sir Richard Branson who has just recently been interviewed by Joe Polish. He’s a billionaire. Congratulations. I am in no stretch of the imagination anywhere near being a billionaire, but I don’t know how anybody could be happier or more fulfilled than I feel right now in the midst of all the adversity.

There’s some adversity that I’m going through right now, relationship-wise, my mother just passed away two weeks ago.  There is adversity everywhere you turn, but I still have an attitude of gratitude. Life is going to throw you curve balls and life is going to test you and surprise you. When those surprises come, how do you handle it? You have the option to approach it in a proactive manner or a reactive manner.

I’ve had some recent things happen for which I could not have been more shocked or surprised that they happened, but they did, and you can’t change the past. You can only handle the situation based on where it is. Today, that’s what happened. That’s the way I agree. Now what? It’s up to me to become the architect, to design how you want to handle that adversity.”

Gary Ambrose, Email Marketing Expert

“I am really not sure at this point exactly what you could say success is. It is different for every person – that is obvious. For me, I am not to the point where I would like to be yet, not by a long shot, because I am still working. I don’t want to be working, I want to be retired, or at least to the point where I am out of the stressful part of business, meaning right now, a lot of the main decisions and processes and things still fall to me. I don’t have a large enough team that I can count on to really develop a lot of the things in my absence.

But, for me, what I really consider to be successful is to get to the point where I have a very steady recurring revenue stream coming in and I am able to take more time off than I spend working. That is not the case now, but I am getting there.

For example, this past year, 2007, I have spent seven-and-a-half weeks on vacation outside of my house. So I am starting to move in the right direction. I have taken a week’s vacation to Vegas and a week’s vacation to Jamaica and a week to Turks and Caicos and I am going on a cruise, and I was just in New York for Thanksgiving to see the Macy’s Parade up there. Seven-and-a-half weeks of vacation isn’t bad.

But it is still not enough. For me, I don’t think I will really consider myself to be successful until the point where I am working less than I am working now. And I am not quite there yet.”

Willie Crawford, Internet Marketing Guru

“I think I have achieved success. To me, success is probably above all things being happy with what you’re doing. It is having a choice in what I do. So many people do jobs they do not want to do. They get up and they go to work at jobs they hate, and they do it because they have to. The work I do, I do it because I want to, and I do it when I want to, and where I want to.

My typical day, if I wanted it to be, would be to get up and take my laptop with my wireless Internet card, and go sit on the beach all day. If I want to do that, I can. I can run my business from the beach, because of wireless Internet and satellites and things like that. So to me, it’s about having choice.

A part of that comes from when I was in the military. Soldiers get told what to do. You have some choice, but mostly you were given orders, and although it was a military career, I learned not to like being told but I like having choice.

For me, success is having choice, and it’s also being happy with what you’re doing. So many people do jobs because they need the money; they don’t do them because they enjoy doing them.”

Michel Fortin, Top Online Copywriter

“When you use the word success, success is actually an event if you define the word success, which is basically when you achieve something. When you achieve something successfully, that is a success. When you label someone a success, you can’t just label it on an achievement or an event because you’re labeling a person. So for that person to be a “success” is to me a person who constantly achieves, who constantly reaches goals. Here’s my definition of what a success is:

You can be a type-A personality, you can go out there and achieve many goals and you can therefore be perceived as a success, but if you focus only on those goals, you might fail in other areas. You might fail at home, in your marriage, in you relationship with your kids. You might fail even in other areas of your business because you’re so focused on achieving. To me, that’s not a success because you’re also failing just as much, or at least you’re not succeeding at things that really matter.

To me, a true success is a person who achieves what they want. I think the best definition of success is something Bob Dylan, the famous singer, said, “Success is waking up in the morning and going to bed at night and in between you did what you wanted to do.”

That’s success. That’s what I consider not only what success is but me being a success because I’m doing right now what I love to do. I love copywriting. I love online marketing. I love business. I love consulting and coaching clients. Because of that, I truly believe that I’m a success. The fact that I made millions of dollars is just a byproduct of doing what I love to do.

There are a lot of people out there who say, “You have to have a passion. You have to love what you do.” Some other people say, “No. You have to find a market that wants something and you have to give it to them.”

I think it was John Reese who said at one time, “Having a passion for a specific market is not going to define your success.” I said, “Right, but the fact that you, John, like to go after markets is a passion in itself, is it not?”

That fact that you are passionately looking for markets who want a product and you give that product to them, even if you’re not passionate about, let’s say, e-books on how to grow better tomatoes, but you went out there and tried to find a market that had a need and you found out that people wanted to buy an e-book on how to grow better tomatoes. That’s a passion in itself.

I’m positive that John – and he can back me up on this – is doing right now what he loves to do. All the top marketers out there who are successful are usually those who do exactly what they want to do. They are passionate about what they’re doing, they do what they love.

That could be anything and everything, even if it is just working on the business that works passively so they can enjoy more time going out surfing or golfing, that to me is still doing what you love to do. That to me is still a success because you did what you want and that’s what I do and that’s why I consider myself a success.”

Stu Mclaren, Affiliate Management Expert

“I think different people define success in different ways. For me, it’s being able to have the freedom and flexibility to be able to do what it is that I want and when I want. I feel that I do have that. I’m very fortunate.

I live out in the middle of nowhere. I live in a small town about an hour and a half south of Toronto. It’s called Port Dover. Nobody’s ever heard of Port Dover. It’s out in the middle of nowhere but I have high-speed Internet access here and that’s what enables me to do what it is that I do. It’s very peaceful and relaxing and I have the flexibility to be able to run errands when I want to run errands.

I just recently got married so there were a lot of errands to be run when you’re putting on a wedding but that’s the beauty of it. I could do what it is that I wanted to do because I wasn’t strapped to particular timeframes or anything of that nature. So having that freedom and flexibility, to me, is a huge success.

Now, I want to grow my business much more than it is right now. I think that’s part of every entrepreneur’s desire is to be able to successfully grow their business. For me, it’s a matter of being able to do what it is that I want to do, have the freedom and flexibility to pursue the things I want to pursue.

My latest goals and ventures really have been guided by my wife because she has a real passion and desire to help children, particularly educate children, in rural communities of third-world countries. We’ve been working together to develop a charity called World Teacher Aid, and the concept is where we generate revenue to be able to fund the salary of a full-time teacher for these rural communities in third-world countries.

She’s taken me all over the world and we’ve stayed with families in El Salvador, Thailand etc, where these kids just don’t have the opportunities that we have available to us all over the world. What’s magical about that is you really become appreciative of the opportunities that we have and that the Internet provides.

Every year we do a fundraising campaign. Last year, we had many great people on the call. John Reese, Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian, David Frey, and Mike Filsaime all collectively came together and we raised just over $17,000, which we were able to take down to a particular community in El Salvador.

My wife, Amy, and I went down there and spent some time with them and helped buy supplies for their schools. We gave to two orphanages and sent 59 girls to school for the year. It was a real magical moment. I think, for me, success is being able to generate revenue, generate sales, and then guide those profits accordingly to those who are less fortunate and maybe don’t have the opportunities that you or I have.

You’re going to see a lot more of what I do is guided by that where we’re looking to take what we do and apply the same principles to building a charity that is run with a different mindset. We don’t want to depend on donations for the charity because when times are tough, donations dry up and that’s not really a good business model for a charity that’s looking to flourish and grow.

What we want to do is be able to create a business model where this charity can fund itself and can grow itself by the products that it provides, of which the sales and revenue go towards funding the different causes that we’re looking to fund. For me, that is success, when you can be in a position to be able to generate revenue and the guide it to the different areas that you want to contribute to.

We’re getting there. We’re not where we want to be. We just started this charity. It came as an idea. It came as a last-minute concept that Amy thought of. We pulled together a very successful fundraising campaign. It exceeded all of our expectations the first time around. Now we’ve seen the potential of this.

It was just last minute and we pulled it together and it went really well, but imagine what would happen if we did this, this, and this and improved this and added that. What’s going to happen is that the process will continue to grow and flourish and that’s going to allow us to be able to contribute to more and more people and offer people more opportunities.

That, to me, is success – having the freedom and flexibility to do what it is that you want to be able to do and then ultimately being able to generate revenue at will and guide those resources accordingly to people who perhaps wouldn’t have the opportunity to be able to do it themselves.“

Steve Renner, Internet Marketing Expert

“Everybody has their own virtual report cards to what they see as success. To me, success really can be translated in a couple of ways. Number-one is money. If you’re successful, you’re making money. That’s the bottom line. To a certain degree, one certain degree or another, you have money coming in. That’s a sign of success.

But money is not everything. Another part of success is having the freedom. That’s what I really like about the Internet business is that it’s free. I’m free. I have freedom to do whatever I want. If I want to pick up and decide to go to Hawaii tomorrow, I can go do it. If I want to travel or if I want to take the day off, I’ve got that freedom.

If I want to go jump in my car and drive across town and have lunch with somebody, or whatever I want to do, that, to me, is success – just to have the freedom to do whatever I want, the freedom to be able to do nice things for your kids and not to have to worry about how you’re going to pay your bills and those kinds of things. To me, that’s success, and the freedom that goes along with it and the peace of mind.”

Rosalind Gardner, Affiliate Marketing Queen

“It is really not about the money, although money helps. But what money really buys is freedom and being able to quit my job and not be dictated to about when I had to appear at work and just being able to take off when I want to and being able to spend more time with my family and friends.

If somebody shows up at the door and I happen to be in the middle of writing an article, so what? I can always make the time for the more important things in life like having coffee with my friends and that sort of thing. That for me is the true definition of success.

The other component for me, too, is having eliminated doubt and fear about being successful because once you overcome a number of obstacles, you realize that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. So just not being worried about what tomorrow will bring in terms of business, finance.

So what if tomorrow you only make whatever? You’d figure another way around it and you know you are going to make more the next day or you bring your earnings up or whatever. Just get rid of the fears and especially with doubting yourself. There is no place for that in business.“

Andrew Fox, Super Affiliate

“What I would define as success is whatever you are happy with. If you want a $20,000 car or you want a $200,000 car, whatever is your own personal goal. Happiness is not related to the size of money, it’s just whatever your personal goal is. I have some friends who say they want to be rich, and other people who just say, “I want to be able to afford to pay my bills comfortably and provide for my family and have a comfortable lifestyle.”

It’s whatever your personal goal is, if you can achieve that. Everybody’s level of success, you may achieve it. It could be: Do you want a $10 million yacht? Do you want your own private jet? Do you just want a nice house and a happy family and a content life? It’s whatever your own personal kind of success. It’s different for every person.”

What The Twitter Community Defines As Success

Now that we now what success means from those industry experts, I then asked the exact same question on Twitter. Within just hours, over 20 replies flooded in. Many of which were FANTASTIC replies that worth gold (follow them if you like what they say):

	itcn @stanleytang To me, success can only be measured by setting a goal, and then meeting or exceeding that goal, whatever that may be.
	1davidn @stanleytang Contented is my one word answer defining success.
	timage @stanleytang Success is a direction, not a destination
	leplan @stanleytang Success is getting to marry a rich man or a beautiful girl 😀
	davidtensen @stanleytang Success is best defined in hindsight – when attitude is best tested.
	mjhawkins @stanleytang Success is knowing your limitations and having people on your team that are ‘smarter’ than you so you can accomplish your goals
	linda3dots @stanleytang I define success as finding joy in being yourself and doing what you are passionate about. When work = play, success follows.
	Aboundlessworld @stanleytang Success is having the courage to follow your dreams.
	karimpirani @stanleytang When one achieves complete and total happiness and fulfillment in one’s personal life…that is MY definition of success
	BecomingTheBest @stanleytang Being the authority, dominant figure and the expert in the chosen niche. The smaller and more focused the better.
	ianandbecky @stanleytang success = acheiving your goals and beyond.Simply not giving up no matter how hard it might seem
	marcpsummers @stanleytang making clients happy, having clients renew year after year, keeping on top of latest trends are three things I class as success
	jjkane @stanleytang being faithful to your values (incld faith), your primary human committments, and being a source of stability and hope
	darreguin @stanleytang Achieving the goals your set. However the trick is, there will always be more so they turn you from success to successful.
	jeanettejoy @stanleytang Success is sharing love doing what you want, when you want while making world better. Can’t go wrong when you start with love.
	melikbilge @stanleytang Success is to do something, and later be able to appreciate that you did it, and how you did it
	passionomics @stanleytang while success certainly does have unique definition to different ppl, i tink happiness is d universal aspect
	WebWealthMaster @stanleytang great question, as it is a very personal and unique definition for all of us!
	kamylynn @stanleytang being happy with all facets of your life =)
	WebWealthMaster @stanleytang Family, Friends, Contributing to collective Joy quality of Life of Others fulfilling personal destiny of Higher Awareness.
	strategicsense @stanleytang success is relative, Stanley. Success is reaching your own goals and setting new ones, all as individual as people.
	catlover_eg @stanleytang To be useful for others.
	KingofSway @stanleytang The Success God reveals through us, when we get out of his way. I call it Success Anonymous ™ Stage Hypnotist Simone
	redacebluzman @stanleytang I define success, in a business sense, as getting paid to do something you’d normally be happy to do for free.

Now we’re back to the question… so what is success? Every guru and Twitterers seem to have different responses. Is it Goals? Passion? Money? Happiness? Success is relative. It’s different for each and one of us. For me, it’s about passion. It’s about being able to do what you love. That’s success to me.

So what’s success to YOU? Leave a comment. Would love to hear 🙂