September 29, 2007

• What is your definition of success?

  Well there’s sort of two ways to thinking about it.

  If you succeed in a game it usually means winning the game, scoring the most points or creating the conditions of victory over your opponent. In life under most societies there’s sort of a primary game that we play where we compete with one another over possessions and power and influence. It used to be success only meant winning in this very specific game. That is, having wealth and power.

  But in the modern era the definition of success has radically shifted. Why? Because we found out that when you define success in terms of victory in this competitive game it doesn’t cause the winners to feel happy. In fact it wasn’t even correlated with happiness. In other words it’s not like a sports game where you virtually always feel a sort of visceral joy when your team manages to seize the day.  In life, you could achieve all of the things typically associated with a successful life and not feel happy at all while at the same time many who seemed to be ‘objectively’ failures, or at least lower scorers, at this life competitive game ended up being much happier.

  It doesn’t generally help to add to the definition additional conditions. I mean you might think that all you have to do is define victory in the game of life as not only being wealthy and influential but also being married or having children or engaging in charity work or whatever. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem  to be the case that there are any special condition that could be added to the definition of success that makes it correlate with happiness.

  So instead, clever people decided to start talking about success in a more subjective language. Now you don’t say “are you successful?” or “am I successful?” so much as we ask questions like this featured question, ie soemthing like “what does success mean to you?” 

  But this new definition of success really just amounts to a new word for being “satisfied”. Satisfaction does correlate pretty strongly with happiness (although they are still not casually related) so it appeals to us a lot more. That’s what success really means in modern parlayence. Success means satisfaction.

  The thing about satisfaction though is that everybody has a different threshold for what makes them feel satisfied. So for example, you have people who are totally satisfied with a 9-5 job and coming home and drinking beer and watching sports in the evenings. It’s unlikely that that will be enough to satisfy most, but for some that’s more than enough.

  Others though are virtually impossible to satisfy. They get their dream job and gain wealth and fame and influence, find and marry the perfect mate, raise wonderful children who are themselves successful, wealthy, and happy and yet still they feel unsatisfied. These people will keep adding new things to their definition of success and then achieving them only to find that it still isn’t enough for them. They just can’t seem to figure out what it is exactly that would make them satisfied. They don’t really know what their personal definition of success.

  I think more people are closer to the second situation than the first, but maybe that’s just my feeling because I could not imagine being one of the first, though I think many people I know probably erroneously think of me as more like the first.

  I don’t ever have very much in the way of outward ambition. I don’t try to get a good job. I never seek out a relationship. I’ve shown no interest in raising children or being famous and I don’t seek out social gatherings that most people associate as being ‘fun’.  I don’t even show much interest in traveling or seeing the world or meeting new people. As far as others see, I seem fully content.to sit and write my blog entries unconcerned about the world around me.

  And I am almost content living that kind of life… but I’m not fully satisfied. The real reason I don’t seek out these other things is that I already know that getting them won’t make me any more satisfied. I may get other joys and other pleasures from filling these standard needs, but I won’t feel any more successful for having them. I understand myself that much. There’s something else I need to achieve first in order to really feel satisfied. I’m just not entirely sure what that is yet.

  When I think about it carefully the closest I can come up with to a definition of what success is for me is something like the idea of “significance”. To be satisfied I need to feel as if the decisions I make mean something to someone, as if I am not simply wasting space.  That’s part of it anyway. Still I’m not entirely sure what my definition of success really is. 
     

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  • 5:31 pm
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