Sales. Likes. Followers. I’m sick of using the same old measuring sticks.

Those are not the things that made me want to be a writer. Not at all.

So what if you really are a success, right now? And you just need to use the right measuring sticks.

Money was not one of mine.

In fact, I still remember the day. I sat at my fifth-grade desk. Miss Farnsworth was about to read the winners of the writing contest. I would have bit my nails, except I already had.

I looked all around the room. Everyone was as hopeful as I was at that moment.

Why is it that when something important is about to happen you hear all the negative voices in your head?

“You’ll never win.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Nothing good ever happens to you.”

“Okay class, quiet down,” Miss Farnsworth said.

I couldn’t sit up any straighter. And I was always quiet. I never wanted one of those red check marks my brothers brought home on their report cards.

The winners of the contest are…

“Barbara Edgecomb, for her poem about babies.”

“And Anne Gollias, for her essay about her shadow.” (Except she called me,“Anastasia,” but that’s another story.)

And I sat there, letting those words sink in. I won. I really won.

I practically flew home to our brown frame-sided house just a few blocks from school.

And I remember yelling out the news, because when you win, you have to yell.

“Mom, Mom, I won! I won!”

And the prize? The prize was the best in the world, especially if you’re only a 5th-grader. We got to go downtown Chicago and recite our piece on WBEZ radio!

No. Money was not one of my measuring sticks.

When I won, it gave me such pleasure knowing something I wrote was valued enough to actually win a contest.

A couple weeks later, Miss Farnsworth adjusted the radio’s volume. My whole class listened to me and Barbara recite our winning pieces. My heart was beating so loudly.

Yes, I remember every moment of that day. Even coming home to find a white box that had been delivered with a corsage from my aunt and uncle. Inside was a card that said, “Congratulations, we’re so proud of you.”

So what are good measuring tools?

Followers?

If you’re going to use your number of followers as a measuring tool, you better realize it will take time before you start feeling successful.

And just as you reach one number, a funny thing will happen. You will still be unsatisfied, wanting even more followers.

I recently heard a successful Medium writer, Tom Kuegler admit that even with his huge following, it did not satisfy him like he thought it would. He shared that with a larger following you have less time to comment, which is something he enjoyed.

I remember feeling good when I reached 500 on my author page. But soon it wasn’t enough. And now, at 1700 I’m still wanting the number to go up.

I’m not sure I ever celebrated any of the numbers.

Ranking?

For those of you who are authors, what about your book’s ranking?

I remember thinking if my books would just sell and if they could become a best seller, then I’d feel successful.

Then I was offered a promotion for one of my books, Broken. It would be advertised and I could benefit from the publicity.

And it reached #1. And not only that, it stayed there for 3 months!

Wanna know something? I was still the same person when my book was lower in ranking as when it reached #1. And my book was the same too.

The very same.

Did it feel good to be #1?

Yes, it felt good. I got more reviews and people were congratulating me. Yes, it felt good, but it didn’t last.

What about sales?

Surely earning more money would make us feel successful. Is this a good measuring tool?

It would be if money is the most important thing to you. Then money would be a valid tool to use.

But I recently heard Jeff Goins, best selling author and speaker, admit when he reached a million dollars his reaction was, “Meh.”

He reached what many people in life may never reach and still it was not what he thought it would be.

There will be challenges

I was about to launch another book. For me writing the books and publishing them gave me great satisfaction.

I’m not a technical person, so I had a lot of challenges. A lot. But I saw them as obstacles to overcome and that’s what I did.

One of my biggest mountains was one of the smallest things. Pagination. Yeah, go figure.

Day after day, I sat and tried to figure out this monster, because to me, that’s what it was.

Just when I thought I had mastered it I would look down and the numbers, which I’m convinced were possessed had all changed.

Once again I tried to do it, and once again I failed.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I heard those numbers laughing at me.

I sought advice from the writer’s group I was in. I googled pagination, I watched You Tube videos on the subject, but still I kept failing.

There was even a time after manually adding the numbers, I looked down to see they had all changed into the same number!

That day, I ended up in tears again, but the next day, I got up and tried again.

And just in case some of you are smirking right now, don’t smirk, some of us are technically proficient, and some of us just have to keep at it.

In my case, even though people were giving me good advice, they didn’t know it wasn’t working. And after a while, I stopped sharing it.

It also didn’t help that they were giving me directions for ‘Word’ and I was working in ‘Pages.’

Stubborn or tenacious?

There is a very fine line between being stubborn and being tenacious. But whatever the line, I was both. I stayed with the task at hand and I would not quit.

And eventually—eventually I did it.

We will find a way to do those things that are important to us.

Charles Swindoll once said, A failure is not someone who fails, it’s someone who stops trying.

So what DOES make me successful?

I was about to launch still another book and my nephew, Drew made a suggestion.

“Maybe it would be good if you defined what success would look like for each book you write.”

I thought it was a great idea. So I sat down to think about that very thing. And I saw that with each book, it did change a little.

Yet, there was a common thread that seemed to be there as well.

Finding that thread

It has taken me years to determine who my audience is. Like many other writers I write about more than one topic. And like other writers, I am sometimes write to different audiences.

This made it extremely difficult to determine who my audience is and what I have to offer them.

I asked my Facebook group, “What do you get from my writing?”

I even made up this visual to see all their answers, making the size of certain answers correlate with how many times it was mentioned.

Each step I took gave me more information about who I was as a writer, and who I was writing to.

Are we there yet?

But there was still more ground to cover. Since I wrote many different topics I still needed to know who my tribe was. Determining my tagline would help, I was told. A tagline is simply what you would quickly tell someone about who you are. I had changed my tagline again and again, but one thing I eventually realized was that each time I changed I was getting closer.

And one day it came to me. My tagline is:

This seemed to envelop my philosophy or worldview and what I have to offer as a writer.

And once I defined that, I realized my measuring tool has been the same, I just needed to recognize what it was.

Touching people

One day as a returning student, the teacher in my brain class gave us a unique opportunity.

“Who would like to hold a human brain?” he asked.

You would have thought I was back in my 2nd grade class, the way I shot my hand up. Just like when Mrs. Aachin asked who wanted to be a line-leader.

I was honestly surprised everyone didn’t want to hold a brain.

After donning rubber gloves the teacher placed the brain, in two parts into my willing hands. It was about 3 pounds. It was one of my highlights of being a returning student.

Another day, the same professor explained if we are writing and we want someone to remember what we’ve written, we need to touch their emotions.

Another aha moment.

It was something I loved doing more than anything in my writing. And that is my measuring tool.

If I have touched someone and impressed some truth to them, I am a success.

What about you?

So what are your measuring tools?

Is it Sales? Money? Number of followers?

Whatever you decide, make sure it’s the most important thing to you, or when you achieve it, you will still feel unsuccessful.

Maybe you’re like me and you want your writing to touch someone.

I think it’s important that we know what we see as success, or we just may miss the opportunity to stop and celebrate.

Maybe you’re a really a success, right now?

Call to Action:

Have you determined what makes you feel like a success?
What is your tagline?
Have you celebrated your success as yet?

Previously published on Publishous , photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash