Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “success”
How Do You Use Awards to Define Yourself? @bethvogt The first award I ever won was for an elementary school spelling bee. I remember standing in a line with my classmates against the chalkboard. Waiting my turn as the teacher called out different words. Silently spelling my classmates words. Concentrating, letter by letter, as I spelled the word I was …
Graduate — and Keep Dreaming @bethvogt My youngest daughter graduates from high school on Friday. Christa is my caboose kiddo. She was born 12 ½ years after my husband Rob and I were finished having children, when her older siblings were 17, 14 and 12. Her arrival was one of those unexpected blessings of life that initially make you think, …
Let’s Choose to Live Well @bethvogt I turned 60 a few days ago. After blogging about this birthday back in January, I haven’t been brooding about it since then. It turns out being on deadline doesn’t leave you much time to brood. And then my youngest daughter had prom the day before my birthday – she’s a senior in …
Choosing to See Grace More Every Day by @bethvogt I haven’t had a perfect day in a long time. To be honest: I haven’t had a perfect day ever. Every day I get up with my plans for how the day is going to go. My plans? They’re not all that fantastic. It’s not like I’m shooting for the …
Know Your Values to Succeed by @bethvogt Success is serious business to a lot of people – to just about everyone. People spend a lot of time defining success. Redefining it. Pursuing it. Achieving it. Set your sights on any sort of goal – academic, athletic, creative – and the question pops up in some form or another: Are …
Learning to Value Ourselves More by @bethvogt I didn’t participate in school sports. Oh, sure, I played the required PE activities where you wait to get picked for a team, hoping you’re not last. And I remember the games of kickball and dodgeball during recess in elementary school – back when schools allowed kids to play dodgeball. Kicking a …
KLowering the Bar to Achieve More by @bethvogt Success, my friends, isn’t always about giving our best effort. Sometimes success is doing a little bit less. Can I get an “amen!”? Over the years, my family has learned to ask, “What’s the wise choice?” And sometimes the best, wisest choice is to stop trying so hard. There are times when …
We all have different goals. Different dreams. Different opportunities. But no matter what we’re aiming for, we all hope to succeed. I’ve attended lots of writers conferences in years past. (Not lately. It’s been more about my daughter’s volleyball tournaments — and I’m okay with that.) When I’m with writers, we talk about the books we’re writing. The books we …
I like it when successful people talk about their failures. Take, for example, when another writer shares how many times their manuscript was rejected before they landed a contract. (The Help by Kathryn Stockett was rejected 60 times.) Or when a pro athlete shares his struggles. (6’7″ NBA pro Paul Pierce was cut from the varsity team in high school …
Each of us is striving toward a different goal, but whatever we want to accomplish requires the same thing: skill, and effort, and time. Sometimes, more than anything else, the time required to reach our goals trips us up. We feel good about ourselves when we’re learning a skill. We feel good about effort of any kind. Pursuing a …
