First of all, Happy New Year! We’re in 2020 and as glasses, promises and intentions rise, let’s stop for a moment and make sure that where we are going is really where we want to go.
What is Success?
Let’s start with a little game. Close your eyes and think about the word SUCCESS…without searching for a politically correct definition of the word or thinking too much. What are the images, sounds, words, sensations that come up ?
If you are like the majority of us, these visions may probably be different from what you would like them to be ideally and are rather linked to materialistic goods, dreams of status, power and celebrity.
But the original meaning of the word Success is very different from what we think and significantly less value laden. It means doing something well, excelling at something, achieving a positive outcome with your actions. If we delve into its meaning, we discover that, etymologically, success comes from the Latin word successus -us, past participle of the verb succedĕre (sec. XVI) – from “sub” (under) and “cedere” (to go), hence it means “to go under”, in other words “to happen” as a consequence of a series of circumstances: intentional actions but also unexpected events. So, Success, in its purest form, would be something that “results” from a series of factors, a mixture of abilities, preparation, capacity but also good fortune and accidental happenings.[1]
The Pressure We Put on Ourselves
Forget about fortune. Never before in society, have expectations been so high in a given lifespan, with regard to what we should achieve. Today we’re told that anyone can do anything, if they want. We live in the “Illusion of Meritocracy”, to cite the philosopher Alain de Botton, where we feel that the possibilities to climb up the ladder are infinite, but even worse, that, because it is possible, we should do it the way we are told to do it.
The other side of the meritocracy medal – which means that if you deserve something, you are going to get it – is that if you don’t get it, it means that you don’t deserve it. This cruel logic cuts off any circumstantial component that, as we know, constantly accompanies our life, any intervention of fortune, fate or casual happening, depending on what you believe in. Paradoxically, it may happen that someone who once was an “unfortunate” person, who found himself in miserable circumstances, today, in this time of sharp meritocracy, will be considered as “deserving” his/her circumstances and thus becomes a “loser”.
For the first time in history, in these secular times, our life is no longer in God’s hands, whatever we mean by “God”, but we are in the Antropocene era, when humans with their impact and technology are the major drivers of change on the planet. We’re on the driver’s seat and it’s more important than ever before to make sure we are driving in the right direction, at least to be true to ourselves and to what Success means to us.
You Can’t Have It All (So, Now Relax)
We can start by freeing ourselves from at least one of the most brainwashing contemporary myths. From pop culture to A-Type self-help books, we are continuously told that we “can have it all”, we can make everything work, we can be the perfect mother/father, husband/wife, a career driven, always on the go, classy, educated, artsy, never tired, aware, calm and relaxed person.
We are bombarded by this kind of messages all the time; consequently, we set for ourselves impossible success targets which we strive with a huge effort to attain. So, let’s say it once and for all: Nobody can be successful at everything, and definitely not all the time, no matter what they tell us. Family life often pays the price of a booming career; besides, it is difficult to be popular while maintaining an unwavering integrity.
The good news is that you can choose your priorities, by being honest and not judging yourself too harshly, while being ready to sacrifice something in the name of what you want to attain. In order to reach “our own success” in fact, we need to be ready to sacrifice something that may be very important to us.
Now, imagine if we discover at some point that we did something in the name of an idea that was someone else’s to begin with.
Whom am I doing this for?
Psychologists have been telling us time and time again how our whole self is influenced by our past and the conditioning we were under while growing up. If we follow this direction we inevitably start reflecting on where our idea of success comes from. These ideas, in fact, very often are not our own, or at least, not at the offset. We’re more “open to suggestions” than we’d like to think and, in order to understand more deeply who we are and what we care about, an accelerated society of quick judgement and laser assumptions doesn’t certainly help.
In fact, we generally figure out people (and are figured out by them) through an exact placement between two coordinates, a point in a Cartesian Ax. Mostly, we tend to take a little bit of information (usually whatever supports our prejudices) and construct the image of the person in front of us, then, on that basis, we decide how much attention, respect and time we are willing to give him/her.
Such a stiff judgment, which usually applies to few categories, leads us to try to satisfy certain standards that are an obvious, measurable, commonly accepted code of net worth in most cases. Career is usually what we identify with, since it is conventionally the most widely accepted value. No wonder we are so anxious about it: emotionally, our business card and LinkedIn profile become the symbol of our worth.
Finding Our Truth
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the Truth”
Pema Chödron, Buddhist Monk
Speaking about truth, we can start by saying that probably no success will ever be as fulfilling as you think it’s going to be. And not only because of the biased forecasting, but also because we’re constantly changing and our needs and priorities are shifting all the time. Once again, in all this mare magnum of impermanence, the solution is to listen carefully to your own self. And this means to stop, listen and observe.
Since our body is wiser than our mind, our intuition, spontaneous gestures, our fears and those moments in which we feel so connected that we do something that will even surprise us, may be the source of the purest messages we receive.
So listen to these signals:
- You feel no interest in something that previously motivated you.
- You feel increased energy at the prospect of getting involved in, or abandoning, a project.
- What are the things, persons, events that give you joy or, on the contrary, repulsion?
- What are the things, persons, events that help you relax and tingle with excitement or, on the contrary, make you stiffen and clench your jaw or your fists?
And you may ask yourself questions, such as:
- Given that you CAN do something, do you WANT to do it?
- Why are you doing it?
- For whom are you doing it?
- What activities are you drawn to, again and again, gradually sliding into them without even realizing it?
- When do you laugh? And when do you frown?
And be honest: nobody is listening 😉!
By Anna Gallotti and Selika Cerofolini
SOURCES
Alain de Botton, A Kinder, Gentler, Philosophy of Success, TED Global 2009.
A.C. Shilton, You Accomplished Something Great. So, Now What? The New York Times, 28 May 2019.
Daniel T. Gilbert et al., Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998, Vol. 75, N. 3, American Psychological Association.
The World Happiness Report, The Hearth Institute at Columbia University, April 1. 2012.
David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man, Sounds True Editions, 2017.
Pema Chödron, When Things Fall Apart, Shambala Publications, 2016.
[1] Treccani Dictionary, http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/successo2/
