No. 2 - REDEFINING SUCCESS IN 2025

“REDEFINING SUCCESS IN 2025”

January 8, 2025 • Issue No. 2

If you know me, you know I’m a big theatre buff (huge, really!) But if you didn’t know, now you know. :) My Instagram is filled with playwrights, directors, producers, and theater critics.

It’s that time of year where everyone on your social media feed is making grand declarations for the year ahead or thoughtful reflections on the year they’ve completed and honestly I can’t get enough. In between making my 2025 vision board and setting some January intentions, I keep circling the same question about success: How will I know when I’ve “done the thing”? Building a business doesn’t have the same metrics as working in a school, a hospital, or a traditional office - there’s no one one to promote me, no one to do a performance review. And the ‘winners’ in business feel millions of dollars beyond my grasp. So when I came across this reel by acclaimed Broadway director Zhailon Levingston captioned “Redefining Success in 2025,” I stopped my scroll because here was someone I see as successful, talking about success…wearing a hoodie in somebody’s backyard.

Here’s the backstory on Zhailon. He’s the youngest Black director to ever lead a show on Broadway and he’s gone on to knock out project after project. His work is always otherworldly, operating on an entirely different plane. He’s one of a few people I see as a contemporary genius in the storytelling space. 

In Zhailon’s video, he lets us in to his journey. It starts with him being cast as a “chubby, short, Black” Aladdin in his school play and how that fueled his dream of one day working on Broadway. Fast forward about 20 years, it’s the beginning of the pandemic and his childhood dream is coming true. In collaboration with the cast and crew, he opened Chicken & Biscuits on Broadway, a comedy about a funeral interrupted by Black family drama. The producers told him the show would be considered a success if it stayed open through the entire limited run. Theatre can be cut-throat, you fill seats every night or your show dies. Zhailon accepted the assignment. 

Chicken & Biscuits didn’t survive it’s limited run, it closed early due to illness among the cast and crew (remember it was a global pandemic…!) and this fractured Zhailon’s metric of success. He felt like a failure even though the conditions were outside of his control. It’s only now looking back that he can see all the ways in which the show was successful: 

• it’s gone on to be produced around the country in community theaters and on college stages; 

• it led to future work not only for him but for his collaborators on the project; 

• he was able to get people to come to a theater during a pandemic fully masked and share in a human experience when it was easier to just stay home; and 

• he was able to live the dream he’d set as a theatre kid (and make history while doing it!)

He didn’t meet the one metric of success given to him by producers, but there were so many ways in which he’d more than satisfied the goals he set for himself. And it reminded me of something I shared in my book, “Finding Your Sparkle At Work.” The real imperfection wasn’t that I didn’t measure up, it was that I was allowing other people to do all the measuring. Zhailon shares the same idea in his own words: 

If you’re like me, the beginning of the year is a reflective and aspirational time. So as you set out to live and work with even more impact than you did last year, I offer some questions - straight from Zhailon - to help quiet the noise and focus on the metric of success that matters most: yours. 

Zhailon drops a lot more gems 💎 in his video, which you can watch in full on his Instagram page here.