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Over the last couple of days my business has come to the point where it's about to step up to a whole new level. Not only have we picked up a major design and development job for a new customer but his partners in another enterprise are looking over our shoulders to see how the new website turns out because they're interested in employing us to develop a whole string of sites for them.

If that all works out then there will be some major changes around here and there will be some in-house staff to manage as well as the guys who work for us remotely. Twelve years ago to think that I would ever be in this position would have made me laugh because it seemed so impossible. Back then I was a single parent with no money and no skills that anyone needed.

So does that now mean that I'm successful? That's something that Steve asked me last night. Now when Steve asks me questions like that I know that he really doesn't want an answer from me, all he wants is for me to think about the question and decide for myself.

And after thinking about it I have to admit that I don't yet consider myself to be successful. I think that way because I haven't yet achieved my goals ... I haven't yet reached that point in my life where I want to be.

In fact I may never reach that point because the more I succeed the more I find that my goals are shifting. Back when I was a single parent with no money and my goal was to reach a point in my life where I wasn't always scratching for money to put food on the table. Later, when I met and married Steve and had reached a point where I actually valued myself my measure of success was to become my own boss.

From that point my measure of success changed again and now it's about to change once more as I am almost at the point where I have achieved my current goals. And interestingly, the more I succeed the more confident I become that I can succeed at just about anything I want to do. As a measure of that confidence I think this weekend Steve and I will sit down and set out our goals for the next year or so in a much more concrete way than we have in the past.

Before now we've talked vaguely of a five year plan but we've never put down any benchmarks to measure our progress towards achieving the goals of that plan. Perhaps we've been too uncertain of our ability to reach those benchmarks and have thought that any sense of failure would set us back. If we were scared of failure then perhaps we thought that by setting no benchmarks we could avoid any failure.

I know that probably sounds like rather twisted thinking but sometimes that's the way my brain works.

So how does your brain work? What is your measure of success and what are the intermediate goals that you have set yourself as you set out to achieve success?

It's when you squarely face those questions and nominate very specific goals that you can really achieve the success you want. If you only have a vague idea of what success might mean to you and the goals you need to reach to achieve success then your chances of being successful are limited.

For example you might consider yourself successful if you've reached the point where you're grossing a million dollars at some point within the next 10 years but without identifying those intermediate goals you won't know whether you're capable of achieving your measure of success or not.

Instead of just nominating some vague monetary measure of success for a period some time in the future you need to break it down into the amount you need to gross on a yearly basis and then you need to break it down to a monthly basis and a weekly basis. Once you have those figures in set out then you need to decide what you are going to do to earn that amount of money each week.

From that point on you are on your way to having a roadmap to follow that will help you achieve your individual goals and achieve your measure of success. Even though having that roadmap can be scary it really is something that you need to keep you on the right road.

And while you're thinking about what your measure of success might be you also need to be aware that not everyone has the same measure of success. For some it might be grossing a million dollars a year, for others it might simply be to live comfortably across the road from a tropical beach while only working three days a week. Or it could be, as it is for one of our friends, to build up a business that he can leave to his children.

Everyone's measure of success is different and, while you need to be able to identify the goals that you must achieve to reach your measure of success, you also need to have a measure of success that is achievable and one that you're comfortable with too.