Your personal definition of success will provide much-needed focus to you and everyone supporting your work. Broadly speaking, your philanthropic success is a win for society—a change for the better that probably wouldn't have occurred without your effort to bring it about. But specifically? Success might mean bringing a polluted river back to life, or reducing maternal fatalities in a developing country, or sharply decreasing a city's homeless population. You alone must decide.

Your personal definition of success will provide much-needed focus to you and everyone supporting your work.

To make this decision, you will need to learn a lot about the problem you hope to solve. But the process of getting your arms around the issues will likely pull you in two directions: on one side, analysis paralysis, where you can't get past the feeling that talking to one more expert or reading one more report, will provide the answer. On the other side, failure to assess a situation thoroughly enough will leave you in danger of making snap judgments, which can result in duplicated efforts or, worse, throwing good money after bad.

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