LIFE LESSON
Redefining your Success
Know what you are pursuing
Recently a post on the internet went extremely viral. It talks about how one is taught to measure success vs what success should probably be defined as. I’m sure you must have seen it (if not, here’s the graphic below). I too had shared this on LinkedIn as a changing paradigm and it got a great response.
The response and virality of this image gave me a sense of how much people related to it. For many people still in jobs today, the treadmill of Job and Salary leaves little time in reality to achieve the remaining slices of the success pie, although everyone agrees that this is what success should look like. I myself was in the first pie until about three years ago, when I had the privilege to become financially independent and leave my job to experience some of the other slices. And I think it all starts with defining what you call your success. As long as you have the first pie in your mind as your definition of success, you will never be able to break out of that treadmill. The first step is to accept in your mind that success doesn’t only mean being rich and powerful. There can be many definitions of success and you have to define yours.
The second even harder step is to clearly differentiate between what you define as your success vs what society defines as your success. For example, one could pick any number of items from this list as a definition of success — Providing for the family, Becoming a CEO, Having good relationships and friends, Becoming famous, Keeping a successful marriage etc. It’s not necessarily society will match your definition of success and so it’s not easy to keep your conviction on your definition. Traditionally success has always been a metric measured by others. It’s when others think you are successful that you feel you are really successful, isn’t it? You need to get out of this mindset and have the conviction to stick to your values even if things around you don’t go your way. This is hard and it’s a true test of your beliefs and your values. One must remember that what matters even more than success is satisfaction. Satisfaction is internal, success is external. There is no point in being super successful if you are broken inside. You may also be aware of a concept called the Hedonic Treadmill. This is the case where someone wins the lottery or has a super successful event but eventually returns to a similar baseline of happiness as they were before like a new normal. So we need to be aware that even a super-successful event in life is not something that will give you life long happiness
Success in this world is often related to winning. If you win, you are successful. If you lose, you are a failure — true? While this is the common feeling, it’s not necessarily the truth. The loser of a grand slam final in a tennis match is not really a failure is he? Although at the end of the day he may feel he has failed because of the social perception associated with losing. But winning doesn’t always equal success, as Valorie Field, the head coach of UCLA Women’s gymnastics team says. In her TED talk, she talks about a female gymnast who was excellent at her sport but just didn’t want to be great again. Winning at all costs, cost her her joy and she just didn’t see it being worthwhile anymore. In her words,
“We can no longer lead from a place where winning is our only metric of success because it has been proven that that process leads to broken human beings. We need to produce and train champions in life without compromising the human spirit”
My personal take on success, in the traditional sense, is that it isn’t worth centering your whole life on, especially if you are comparing your success with others. Also it isn’t a permanent state that once you are successful, you will always be successful. Many people who were considered successful at one time have been found guilty or corrupt later leading to a sharp decline in their successful image. Money, which is often associated as a large part of success diminishes in value beyond a point. Ultimately it’s good relationships that will keep a smile on your face till the end. If there are few more slices we could add to the second pie on top, relationships would definitely be one in my list. Good relationships require time, humility, love, caring and different ingredients to develop and maintain. Money definitely isn’t an ingredient for it. From that perspective, money is cheap and relationships are expensive. Taking the time to reflect back on our goals and our values helps us come up with our own definition of success and that can be a guiding light for the larger decisions one takes in life.
