Redefining Success
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
Recently, I’ve been asked a few times “Why ‘Victorious?’ What does that mean?”
For me, Becoming Victorious has never been about beating the competition. It’s not about being first, richest, or most admired. It’s not about demonstrating success to the outside world.
It’s about taking control of the definition: deciding what success looks like for your life, your values, and your circumstances.
Winning, in the conventional sense, is often someone else’s scoreboard. I’m more interested in keeping my own.
For a long time, I craved more clients, more recognition, bigger projects, and measurable proof that I was moving forward. But with every external milestone reached, the feeling of satisfaction was fleeting. Something always came next. There was always a new target, a higher expectation, another level of pressure. The success I thought I wanted started to feel hollow.
It wasn’t until I began questioning the definition itself that things began to change. What if victory isn’t defined by position, but by alignment? What if the goal is not to win according to a borrowed standard, but to live in such a way that my values, my relationships, and my energy flow in the same direction? What if Becoming Victorious means that I get to say, with confidence and clarity, “This is the person I want to be?”
The people I most admire are not always the ones who have the biggest platforms, but the ones who radiate steadiness. They have a calm rootedness in their work and their presence. They’ve defined what matters most and organized their life around it. That is success. And it’s deeply personal.
To me, victory looks like honest work that doesn’t compromise my integrity. It looks like presence in my marriage and in parenting. It looks like having the energy at the end of the day to take a walk, call a friend, or sit with a book. None of that shows up in an award ceremony, but it adds up to a life that feels aligned, grounded, and real.
My purpose is to create beauty. I love building, whether a business, a system, an object or a place. I care most about always doing excellent work, and there’s still a place for ambition. But now I ask different, often harder, questions: Does this opportunity support my long-term vision? Will it drain me, or will it fuel the parts of my life that matter most? Is this success on my terms?
Becoming Victorious is the quiet consistency of choosing the life you actually want and refusing to measure yourself by someone else’s idea of what winning looks like.
[Angelou, Maya. Interview with The New York Times, 1988.]