Most people think their experiences show them who they are, not what they have chosen. They do not know they have the ability to shape their experiences like the potter shapes clay. You are the artist and you are also the art that is being created. You choose the colors, where to add and remove clay, and you determine whether the art will be dark and depressing or light and joyful. There is no limit to your creative capacity.

I came across this quote recently and had to capture it. It expresses in a beautiful way the essence of self-awareness, self-development, and self-mastery. We truly are the canvas on which we paint our lives. The key to it is recognizing that we can. We are neither what we do nor what we’ve done. I used to think I was my job or position. I was all about status and the trappings of success. The problem with all this is that circumstances and luck played a much bigger role in my success than I realized. Many of us assume that our success reflects how good we are at what we do. In actuality, our success is often some vaguely defined combination of:

This short list illustrates how random, uncertain, and ambiguous job performance and career success can be and the truth is that there aren’t strong correlations with job success with any of the above. By far, the best indicator of job success is the presence (or absence) of behavioral traits that match up with the traits of people who have exhibited strong success in that job in the past. There is a long history of this being the case. Many organizations around the world have used this approach for years.