How Do You Define Success?

I was taking a break recently and was perusing my FaceBook feed. One post in particular caught my attention.

“Anyone know how to blog successfully?”

Without stating the obvious, since you are reading this on what I like to think is a blog with at least a shred of success, I replied.

Now if you know me from my writings or if you’ve worked with me, you might be able to figure out what my response was.

Basically, I said you have to define success first. If you don’t, it is hard to know when you’ve achieved it, it is hard to know what changes you need to make, and it is hard to get help.

I also spurted out a bunch of other little tidbits about blogging. That resulted in a friend of my friend asking me about blogging. The gist was that it interested her, but she wasn’t sure what to write about. I suggested carrying around a notebook and jotting down ideas for a week or two to see what bubbled up.

But her question really highlighted another point. The same activity can be for work or personal and measuring success for the two would be very different.

Anyway, as part of the response, I wanted to demonstrate vlogging, so I pumped out a video. Now, this video is, admittedly, not the best quality. Let me explain.

I’ve been improving my ‘studio’ in my home office. I mounted my lights to the walls on booms and got a shotgun mic mounted also. This got rid of 4 or 5 tripods and lights stuck on my shelving.

I also got a ‘slider’ to make my videos more dynamic on my second camera. For this video, though, I was primarily testing out my shotgun mic. As a result, I kind of forgot to check my settings on my cameras, properly adjust the lighting, dial in the slider, and make sure that my video was framed correctly. The results feel like a step back, but the new setup is going to help a lot when I actually use it properly!

That’s enough writing. The goal here was a speedy video, and I accomplished that measure of success.

Enjoy the video.

NOTE: We are retiring our Velaction Video platform. You can now watch the video (and other videos) at Continuous Improvement Central.