Building success beyond personal gain

At the beginning of 2008, you may find it timely to think about where you are in your career and your life.

To stimulate this thought process, I invite you to consider the following seven questions and answer them as honestly as you can:

1: Where are you are in your career?

• First quarter
• Second quarter
• Third quarter
• Fourth quarter
• Retired

2: How do you assess yourself in your profession?

• Just getting started
• Intermediate
• High-performer
• Expert
• World class

3: What percent of your focus is on the following (for a total of 100%)?

• To excel and achieve personal success
• To make others around me successful

4. What three things have the greatest meaning in your life?

5. Have you found your life's calling?

• Not looking
• Still searching
• I think so
• Definitely

6. How great an impact do you believe your life's calling can ultimately have?

• Meaningful at an individual level
• Important at the local level
• Significant for the community at large
• World-changing

7. How close are you to realizing this potential?

• Just starting to make a dent
• About a quarter of the way there
• About halfway there
• Almost there

Keep your answers in mind as you continue reading.

Beyond success

Over the past two decades I've had the opportunity to advise and recruit many extraordinary individuals. Often, these are people who have reached the pinnacle of success. Yet what's become clear to me is that reaching even the highest-profile, highest-paid, or highest-prestige positions isn't what's most important.

Sure, it's great to achieve all these things, and very few who do complain about it. But whether they've already reached the top, are just starting out, or are somewhere along the way, almost everyone yearns -- especially when they take the time to reflect -- for something more fundamentally gratifying in their lives.

So what is it that everyone is searching for? A legacy.

Making a Real Difference

Let me introduce three individuals I recently spent time with, all of whom are building a legacy. Before you say, "Oh, it's easy for them," recognize that among the three, one is a self-made tech entrepreneur, another has been a lifelong academic, and the third is a restaurant owner who immigrated to the United States from Ireland and didn't graduate high school.

Rob Glaser is the chairman and CEO of RealNetworks (RNWK), a company he established in 1994. Well known as one of the founding fathers of streaming media, Rob has played an integral role in the transformation of the Internet into a mass medium.

While running this half-billion dollar company is more than a full-time job, he has another mission that also consumes his aspirations. Long dedicated to social causes, Rob has made the following commitment: "I want to change the political discourse in America from the antagonistic 'liberal versus conservative' paradigm to a more constructive 'progressive versus conservative,' and in so doing create a durable progressive majority."

Through a joint effort of his family's Glaser Progress Foundation, which has distributed over $21 million for philanthropic causes since its creation in 1993, and the Center for American Progress, Rob wants to educate Americans about what it means to be a progressive. Approaching the issue with the same entrepreneurial zeal that led to RealNetworks, Rob has led the development and testing of 30-second TV ads to hone the progressive message and support the movement. (You can check out one of the spots on YouTube.)

No laptop left behind

•Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a not-for-profit educational organization. Negroponte is on leave from MIT, where he's the cofounder and director of the MIT Media Lab. A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and a member of the MIT faculty since 1966, Negroponte is also the author of the 1996 bestseller "Being Digital," which has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Beyond the classroom, Negroponte has been working for years to make education a reality for the children of the developing world. With OLPC, he's assembled the leading computer hardware, software, industrial design, manufacturing, and distribution resources to make the best possible laptop at the lowest possible cost, and is distributing it as widely as possible to children in developing countries as an educational tool.

Negroponte has said that "OLPC is an education company, not a computer company." The introduction of the eye-catching, Internet-enabled, rugged computers, called XO Laptops (which are designed for effective use in bright sunlight and with limited power), has literally transformed villages in Africa. "Once the kids have the XO, it unleashes their creativity and accelerates their learning. It has also led to immediately greater school attendance, since kids want to be part of it."

Mass production of the XO machines has just started. "The first kids just got their laptops in Peru and Mexico," Negroponte said. "We're only making about 5,000 a week now, but we hope to make a million a month next year. In laptop-land, where everyone in the world combines to make 5 million laptops a month, this is a big number." When asked why he chose to make OLPC a nonprofit, Negroponte said, "Being a nonprofit leads to exceptional clarity of purpose for everyone involved, and purity of interactions with governments around the world. There isn't a head of state that won't take a meeting on this, which they certainly would not do if we were a for-profit company."

Food for thought

Noel Cunningham is the founder and owner of Strings restaurant in Denver, a popular destination for locals and out-of-towners alike. Having moved to the United States in the mid-'70s, he considers the restaurant a way to earn a living and a vehicle to help others.

Cunningham has served on the board of Share Our Strength, an organization of restaurateurs that helps the hungry worldwide. Along with his wife, Tammy, he also founded the Cunningham Foundation in 2003 to raise and distribute money to assist with education and community development in Ethiopia.

Why Ethiopia? "In 1984," he said, "when I was a chef at a posh private dining club in Los Angeles, I was distraught when the owners refused to hold a benefit for victims of a tragic famine in Ethiopia. I vowed that if I ever owned a restaurant, I would never withhold the ability to support important causes." He started a program called Quarters for Kids, which encourages the 225,000 high school students in Colorado to forgo a soda or candy bar for a day and give the dollar it would cost to the program.

"In Ethiopia," Cunningham stresses, "a quarter will buy breakfast, a quarter will buy lunch, and fifty cents will help pay for a school uniform and shoes." Every year, he takes six Colorado students (chosen randomly from all donors) on a trip to Ethiopia to experience firsthand the difference their efforts are making.

A homework assignment

As these cases hopefully illustrate, true success is achieved when you devote your energies to something you're passionate about that benefits others. Those who have amassed great wealth, power, and fame are remembered not for the achievements they racked up for themselves, but for the success they bestowed upon the world at large.

As you look at your life at the end of 2007, don't just plan for success and stop once you've attained it. There are so many worthy and important causes out there to work for. The more you can transcend personal achievement and enhance the lives of others, the more your positive impact spreads.

With that in mind, here's an assignment:

• Reflect on your answers to the seven questions above.
• Write a paragraph about what you'll be doing 10 years from now and send it to me at dynamicpath@spencerstuart.com.

Related link

Previous articles by Jim Citrin can be found on Yahoo!Finance.

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Reprinted by permission.