Define what success means to you

I lived in a family with not a lot of money. I will never complain about that because we always had what we needed. We always had more than enough to eat, always had a roof above our head and never really experienced not having something we needed. We weren't poor, we just didn't have a lot of money.

That influenced what success means to me at a subconscious level. Because we never really had amazing cars, amazing computers and the most amazing house, and because my parents and most of my family kept complaining about that, saying how nice it would be to have millions of dollars, I got to believe that success meant having a lot of money.

This is true in some situations, but it's false most of the time. One of the main reasons for this I found out to be that if you go through life with that mentality, if you think success is only defined by the amount of money you have, and if you do everything thinking about that, you will never really have the amount you desire.

Some will always want more even if they'll have billions, while others won't be able to make enough money to live a decent life without worries, simply because they don't think about anything else. What I learned after a series of unfortunate events is that whenever you chase monetary rewards and whenever you focus on doing whatever you need just to get paid, you will not receive the rewards you desire.

The main reason for this is that making money is not as hard as we think. For example, I managed to build a Graphic River profile in a few months that generates some income. It's not a lot, but it's better than nothing. One of the main reasons I'm not extremely proud of that profile and I don't think it's amazing is because the design packages I created aren't near as good as what others are doing.

There are people on that website who create amazing print elements, illustrations, banners, backgrounds and all kind of things that look amazing. I, on the other hand, created a lot of backgrounds that aren't incredible and a lot of actions featuring photo effects. If you don't know what that is, you can simply go to your phone, take a picture and search for filters. Some will make your photo look in a vintage way while other filters will add a nice warm effect to your image.

That's what I've been doing for a few months now, and I've been doing it in a decent way. I uploaded over 300 design packages and I managed to make something with that. However, one of the main reasons I'm not making a lot of money at the present moment is because that's the only thing I cared about. I needed to have an income really fast and because of that I focused on making something simple in order to just upload content.

It worked, and now I have an income. But the people who never really thought about that, the people who work really hard every day to create amazing things, get a lot more than I do. Why? Because instead of focusing on money, they focus on passion and on quality, and the consequence of that is higher rewards.

Making money is easy and because of that the things you have to work on to get any rewards aren't as hard as you may think. The Photoshop Actions I created over the past 6 months aren't something incredibly hard to make, yet they generate income. Focusing on that I managed to create a lot of design packages, but because I chased money and because I didn't do something really high quality, the income I receive isn't as big as the income received by the people who worked really hard just because they loved what they did.

One of the main reasons this happened is because at a subconscious level, my definition of success is having a lot of money. No matter what I do this is in my brain and it's hard to get rid of it (or I just didn't find out how to do it yet), and it always makes me look at the income I make trying to decide if I'm a successful person or not.

This is why lately I've been trying my best to focus on quality and nothing more, to define what success means to me and to change the way I do things. Instead of doing whatever little thing I can to make some money, I try my best to work on things that require more time and are better than what I previously did.

Because of that I've been getting more and more rewards lately, especially when it comes to Steemit (not monetary rewards, but more followers), and I'm pretty sure that if I keep doing this, I'll be able to get even more in the future. It's ironic how in order to get the rewards you desire you just need to not focus on those rewards.

So, what is your definition of success? When will you be successful? I believe those are really important questions that most people should ask themselves in order to make sure they are chasing the right thing. Mine, at the present moment, is getting really good at my work and creating amazing content. I will let the money be a consequence of that. Do you know what success means to you?