My own success was the hardest to see.
I had been so focused on what wasn’t done yet that I never paused to recognize what I already built. I kept pushing for the next milestone, without ever acknowledging the one I just reached.
Even as my company grew. Even as clients trusted us with their most critical systems. Even as people on my team stayed with me for over a decade…I still carried the weight of not enough.
In the early days of building Onward IT, I knew exactly where that weight came from. I was comparing myself to everyone else in the industry and trying to be like them, so I said yes to almost anything that came my way, including clients who were never actually a good fit for how we worked.
It led to burnout and stretched my team thin trying to be everything to everyone. I was exhausted, and it felt like nothing was working, no matter how much more I said yes to.
The Lie I Told Myself About Success
For a long time I told myself the problem was the clients, or the hours, or that I just hadn’t grown fast enough yet. (It wasn’t.) The real problem was that I had never sat down and defined what success actually meant to me. Without a clear definition of my own, I borrowed everyone else’s definition instead, and their scoreboard became mine.
It took me years to see that growth itself was never the goal. When you don’t have your own definition of success, revenue and client count become the only numbers available to prove to yourself you’re doing okay, so you chase them, without questioning whether that’s what you actually want.
How I Redefined Success For Myself
Once I saw that, I stopped trying to win someone else’s game and started building my own. Three things changed how I run Onward IT since then.
- Clarity came first. I had to actually name what success meant to me, not to my industry or my peers, before I could stop measuring myself against either one. For me, that means my team feeling safe, my clients feeling genuinely cared for, and getting to spend my days building things that last and are meaningful.
- Consistency came next. We sell to the right people at the right time now, not chasing “more, more, more.” I stopped trying to position us as better than the competition and started just explaining what we do, why we do it, and the track record we’ve built doing it that way.
- Conviction is the one I’ve had to practice and protect the most. That looks like saying no to whatever doesn’t align, even when it looks appealing. Picking the projects and the people who were an actual fit, instead of the ones that would have made the numbers look better on paper, naturally turned into a business that’s closing in on multiple millions in revenue, run by a team of five. For an IT services company, that’s a number most people don’t expect from a team that size.
The Psychology Behind Defining Success For Yourself
This isn’t just a personal conviction based on my own experience. It shows up in the research too.
Psychologist Leon Festinger’s foundational research on social comparison found that in the absence of clear, objective standards for how we’re doing, people default to measuring themselves against others instead (Human Relations, 1954). That’s exactly the trap I was in. Without my own definition of success, comparison filled the gap automatically, and their scoreboard became mine by default.
The cost of staying in that trap is well documented too. Christina Maslach’s research on burnout, the foundation of the widely used Maslach Burnout Inventory, shows that unchecked expansion and overcommitment without real boundaries reliably produces exhaustion and depersonalization, exactly what I felt working flat out on client work that was never a good fit to begin with (Maslach Burnout Inventory Manual). Chasing a scoreboard you didn’t design is a debt that eventually comes due.
The Same Pattern Shows Up Far Outside IT
Onward IT isn’t the only proof this holds up.
Warren Buffett has run one of the most successful investment records in history on a version of the same principle: define your own circle of competence, and ignore what everyone else is chasing outside it. In his iconic 1996 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, he wrote, “You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital” (Berkshire Hathaway, 1996 Shareholder Letter). Buffett has spent decades resisting the pressure to chase whatever the rest of the market was excited about. That discipline is what led to results that are durable.
WeWork tells the cautionary version of the same story. Backed by billions in capital and a mandate to expand as fast as possible, the company’s growth was never matched by a real plan for profitability or cost discipline. As one analysis from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business put it, “WeWork’s aggressive pursuit of fast growth was not backed by a long-term roadmap to profitability or a plan to attenuate ballooning costs” (Darden Ideas to Action). The company was running up a scoreboard the market and its investors had handed it, instead of ever defining its own. It collapsed by billions before it recovered.
Two very different industries, but the same lesson: going after someone else’s definition of success will eventually run you into the ground.
Redefining Success Isn’t a One-Time Decision
I wish I could say I defined success for myself once and for all, then never had to check it again. The truth is that there have been stretches, even in recent years, where ambition started whispering louder than alignment again. This usually happens when I got excited about a new direction and start making changes fast without checking whether my team was actually along for it.
The tool that keeps my definition of success honest is our mission, vision, and values. They are not something we wrote once and stuck on a website. We check ourselves against these every year because those words only mean anything if they actually guide your decisions. So instead of assuming I know how things are landing, I ask my team directly what they’re actually experiencing, and I let that shape whether we’re still aligned or just moving fast. That’s how mission and vision keep working for me: not as a poster on the wall, but as the standard I keep measuring my own definition of success against, on purpose, every year.
Whose Scoreboard Are You Using?
I carried the weight of ‘not enough’ for most of my career, even while all the evidence said otherwise. That weight didn’t lift when the business grew to a certain number. Instead, it lifted when I stopped using their scoreboard and built my own.
What does a successful business actually feel like to you, not just look like from the outside? If you’re scaling something right now and the next “more” in front of you feels like it will finally prove you’ve made it, sit with that question before you say yes. Stop measuring your growth by what the rest of your industry says it should look like. Define your own scoreboard, and protect it, even when a bigger number is on the table.
If this way of thinking about growth resonates with you, stay connected at evolvingonward.com.