No one cares about what you did yesterday - they'll only care about what you can do tomorrow.
That's why it's never a good time to rest on your laurels - it's only a good time to establish some new ones!
This means that you have to keep redefining your ideas of success - it's not what you have accomplished yesterday, but what you hope to accomplish tomorrow.
By getting into a mindset that it's what's next that matters, you'll focus on what you need to do learn, adapt, and grow - you get into a mindset of moving forward rather than resting or standing still. Besides, doing what you were doing yesterday might be completely irrelevant, because the world around you is changing way too fast. If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll end up getting what you've always got - and that might not necessarily be a good thing!
By focusing on always moving forward, you'll also develop more resilience to fast-moving circumstances. You know that the future will be full of surprises, volatility, and the unknown, and so you need some agility in your core that will help you act accordingly. By relying too much on your past success, you might not be able to learn how to quickly evolve when things don't work out in the way that you hoped - but by challenging yourself to constantly change, you'll be able to change when you absolutely need to!
Emphasizing new success rather than relying on old glories will also give you a renewed sense of motivation - setting some future-oriented goals will give you a sense of purpose and lots of initiative. If you stay stuck on yesterday, you'll end up getting stuck in a rut that you can't get out of - making future efforts to escape much more difficult.
Thinking about tomorrow's success based on today's action will also require you to shift your focus. That will help you avoid the danger of complacency - one of the most dangerous attitudes that you can develop. Complacency is the culture that destroys all initiative and almost guarantees waves of negative, destructive failure.
Oh, and redefining success will also mean that you won't keep repeating the same old mistakes over and over and over again. We can become trapped in routine, trying to attain the same old success by doing the same old thing - and this will never help us to find and define the next success. Do what you haven't done to keep finding what you could be doing tomorrow!
Bottom line? Your future can be enhanced by your past success - but your next success will be more important in continuously redefining it!
Futurist Jim Carroll believes in the criticality of 'continuous personal reinvention,' a key mindset in chasing the elusive idea of the next success.
Thank you for reading Jim Carroll's Daily Inspiration. This post is public so feel free to share it.