This week I had the privilege of hosting the launch event for Mike Saunders‘ book, The Five Year Mark. The book is about all the lessons learned in the first five years building Digitlab, a digital agency. You can read my review and my learnings here but those are not the most salient points for me. It was what Mike said when I asked him about the next 5 years and his level of pride in what he has built in the past year, that stuck.
What he said was [in much better English than this] when he started the business, his view of success was to take from the world as much as he could [money] and measure his success against this metric, but over time he has moved the needle of achievement from “Success to Significance.”
Mike wants to be significant. That can mean a legacy business. That can mean helping people grow in their own lives and businesses. That can mean helping someone who is desperate on the side of the road make it through another week. Significance is different from person to person and from interaction to interaction but if Mike is significant to you, then that is his new definition of success.
I like this outlook. A lot. I also believe that if he is significant in peoples’ lives and in business that the old metric [money] will come, in spades as the byproduct. Its not often you meet people who say things like this that you actually believe. Its often just a marketing message, but I believe Mike. You should too. Buy the book.
