What is Success?

Most people want to be “successful”. Though the idea is often vague in their minds, it usually involves earning an income that provides at least a middle class life, having a family with whom they can spend quality time, and building a career that they and their peers respect. All of those things are great and might well be in your plans life, but I’m not going to talk about success as achieving this standard image. I want to talk about success in two ways—in what you might call a straightforward definition and a larger definition.

The straightforward definition of success is setting and achieving one goal or many goals. If you are confused about how to become successful in any area of your life, or in general how to be “a success”, here’s the answer in a nutshell: 1) set a goal, and if it’s a big goal, set intermediate  goals; 2) figure out the behaviors you need to get to those goals; 3) stick with those behaviors. This process is the key to achieving anything that is achievable in life. It is simple, though not always easy. Everyone who is successful does these steps even if they don’t think about them. Interestingly, many people are successful at some aspect of their life, such as a career or sports, but don’t understand that they used this elementary formula and so don’t see how to copy that success in other parts of their lives. (Again, I’m not calling it easy—I’m just saying that the formula is the same.)

It’s fine to use this site with only this straightforward perspective of achieving success in mind and never consider what I call the larger perspective, which I’ll talk about in a minute. So if you came here just to figure out how to make more money than you do now, great. (I can relate: in my late thirties I went back to school to become a nurse so that I could earn enough to support my family.) You can set a goal of earning $150K per year, or whatever number makes sense to you, and then figure out a way to get there. Let’s say you settle on becoming an attorney. (You need to confirm that attorneys in your area earn that much—maybe not the first year, but in less than a decade after finishing school. If they don’t, you’ll have to pick a different path or get ready to move to where they do.) Then you have to figure out how to make yourself an excellent law school applicant and how to go to law school while supporting yourself. You figure all of this out (as I said, it’s not necessarily easy), start doing the work, and keep doing the work even when you hit obstacles or lose your enthusiasm.

There will be challenges all along the way with a big goal like the one above. Maybe you live in an area where attorneys earn $100K, so now you have to commit to working more hours somehow (attorneys work long hours as a baseline), or decide to move to a different city, or instead figure out a whole different path. If you realize that you don’t need $150K, but $110K will be enough, you will have more and maybe easier options. But the steps remain the same. Again, it’s straightforward, though not easy.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. You weigh 230 pounds and either your doctor or an article you’ve read has told you that 150-170 pounds is your healthy weight range. So you set a goal of losing sixty pounds. You figure out the behaviors you need to do to achieve that goal, such as eating out less, only allowing yourself one soda a day and two desserts a week, eating just two meals a day with fruit and veggie snacks to tide you over, going to the gym three days a week, doing group classes at the gym because they push you harder, etc. Then you need to stick with those behaviors, which for most people is the hard part. To take on and stick with these behaviors, you might need to do steps like changing your home to one without lots of temptations, joining a support group or getting accountability partners, and talking to your family about helping you rather than hurting you with their habits. This is a goal and a path that can have a lot of ups and downs, and bring a lot of self criticism. You can read or listen to Blame the Process to learn more about seeing what’s going wrong without calling yourself a failure. But the point now is that the formula is the same: set the goal, plan the behaviors, stick with them.

Of course, there are many smaller goals in life and you can apply the exact same ideas to them. If you want to read more books, you can set a goal for how many books you read in a year, then make a plan to reach that goal (read fifteen pages a day five days a week) and then do the plan. Like losing weight and in fact any goal that involves a change of lifestyle, the hardest part—the reason most people fail to achieve these goals—is in sticking with the behaviors. For the first couple of weeks, it’s easy to set aside your phone and turn off your TV so you can read because doing so has an enjoyable novelty and the immediate reward of telling yourself that you’re improving your life. But after that initial period of enthusiasm, the novelty wears off and the immediate reward fades, so it’s much easier to go back to using your electronics. We should never underestimate the strength of our old habits and their ability to reassert themselves. It is this problem that James Clear tackles in Atomic Habits. I’ll talk about it a lot in Work Your Behaviors and Stick With Things Beyond Enthusiasm.

So the straightforward perspective of success, as I mean it, involves using the three-step formula to achieve one or many goals. What’s the larger perspective? The larger perspective is what Jim Rohn called designing your life. The idea is to work toward your potential and improve your overall happiness with your life, which psychologists call “eudaimonic happiness”. (For a quick overview of the ideas of hedonic and eudaimonic happiness, see What Is Happiness.) Working with this perspective requires that you think about what would bring meaning to your life and that you regularly reassess those thoughts as time passes. In the Set Goals article, I take this larger perspective and encourage you to do so as well. My advice there is to write life, five year, and one year goals, and to rewrite them regularly so that the path you’re trying to walk is never far from your mind. Doing so helps keep your goals in focus and also makes it easy to adjust them when you want.

Understand that, for any particular goal, the formula for achieving success will always be the one I talk about above: set a goal, choose the behaviors that will get you there, and stick with those behaviors long enough to reach the goal. But now you’re asking yourself “What collection of goals represents the best use of my life and will make me happiest?” A typical move in an article like this would be to say that, when you think about what will really make you happy, you’ll realize that you don’t actually want that standard model of success. But I’m not saying that at all. It’s possible that you will have such a realization. You may decide that instead of family life and a steady job, you should spend six months of every year on a silent retreat. Or that all you really care about is being a great writer. But if what you really want is the classic dream of a comfortable income, a family you love, and a career that you respect, I’m all for it. What I’m urging here is that you put some time into really thinking about your wishes and that you continue to do so as you go through your life. For many people, what they want from life at forty or at sixty is not what they wanted when they were twenty. And realize that you can achieve more in life than just your top priorities. You want to have a nice place to live and healthy children? Great. Do you also want to be a musician, travel the world, make volunteering part of your life, host great parties, or give a lot of money to charity? Those are possibilities also with proper use of the three steps (though the priorities will always come first—that’s why they’re the priorities).

A couple of more points about success. First, as I said in the first two articles and as I will say again and again: your value as a person doesn’t come from achieving your goals. I’m not just being nice when I say that: it’s the truth and accepting that truth will actually make you more likely to succeed. You won’t finally become valuable when you earn $95,000, or if you earn $95,000 and feel bad about yourself you won’t finally become valuable when you earn $150,000. You won’t finally become valuable when you earn your college degree. You won’t finally become valuable when you weigh less than 200 lbs. You won’t finally become valuable when you get married. Your goals are not about giving you value because you’re already valuable.

Second, there will be frustration and disappointment along the way. Even if you’re on the right path—you’ve set goals and started behaviors that will improve your life and the lives of people around you—that’s not going to stop obstacles appearing, it’s not going to stop you making big mistakes, it’s not going to stop the moments when you realize just how far away you are from reaching your goals, and it’s not going to make some voices in your head emphasize all of your faults. There’s a saying that it’s okay to be disappointed, but never discouraged. This advice is correct, but can be hard to follow. The bigger your goals and the more goals you have, the more likely you are to face both disappointment and discouragement. You must persist even when facing these feelings.

Alright, let’s review the mantra and then we’re done. If you haven’t read the first two articles on the site, What Is This Podcast and What Is Happiness, here is the mantra: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. I know it’s not very catchy—I complain about it myself in What Is This Podcast—but you still need to get the ideas into your head. First, you matter: as I said a minute ago, you have worth right now, just as you are. Second, this work matters: since you have value, your ability to achieve your goals matters. Do not think that you could be spending your time in some better way than working toward your goals. If you set good goals, that cannot be true. Finally, you can do this work: whatever place you’re starting from and however many times you’ve failed, you can achieve your goals. I’m not promising the impossible—at the age of forty-nine, I’m not going to become an NBA player or an astronaut—but you can definitely do the work of setting big goals, choosing behaviors that will get you to those goals, and sticking with those behaviors until you succeed. Tell yourself this mantra every day until it’s truth becomes obvious to you (and that may be years from now).

Thank you for reading to the end! See you soon.