Opinion: On Defining Success

As 2020 wraps up, I think it is a good time to reflect and look forward a bit to what has made me happiest and feeling most successful. If I have learned anything this year, it is that there are things you can control, and things you cannot control. One of the most powerful things you can control is what you allow into your life.

This post is meant to be a whirlwind introduction to my thoughts on success and the practical philosophy I am developing. Of course, nobody has the one answer and entire libraries can be written on the topic, but I thought it might be helpful for me to share my thoughts on the matter.

This post is partially inspired by Nietzche’s book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ¹. The book is covers this topic and more and has a lot of great content on the subject, so if you are interested I definitely reccomend checking it out. I will use ideas from the book in defining what I mean by “success” in this context.

Core Concepts

When I started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I came across an exceptionally profound question that granted me a valuable paradigm, in which I started to formulate this philosophy. The question is a thought experiment that has to do with Nietzche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence.

Eternal Recurrence

Imagine that tonight a demon sneaks into your bedroom and poses you a directive: you are to relive your life exactly in the same way up until this point an infinite amount of times. What is your reaction? Do you scream in terror at the thought of such a horrible task? Or does your face light up when you imagine all the pleasure you will have from each iteration? The sad fact of the matter is that most of us live in the first camp. However, now that we understand this question and our response to it, we can make steady progress towards the second camp. Today my goal is to share a bit about my personal, practical philosophy/framework for getting there, and I frame it in terms of success.

The Uberhuman

In the book, the main protagonist Zarathustra explains that the human is meant to be overcome. He sees the Uberhuman as the actualization of the next evolution in man as a higher state of being. This is represented in popular culture by the baby at the end of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

By Nietzche’s definition, a true Uberhuman has likely not been born yet, and if they do exist they are incredibly rare and most people would not even know how to recognize one. Basically, if you are reading this then you are unfortunately more human than Uberhuman due to the imperfections (such as trauma) that naturally come in as you lead a normal life.

In practical terms, we can think about this as self-actualization. We all have an image of the best versions of ourselves, and what we want our lives to look like. My view of success is living in that space. All of the elements in our lives are aligned in such a way that we are living in accordance with our highest selves.

In order to understand this picture fully, it is worthwhile to also introduce two more key concepts from the book.

Will to Power

Will to power can be understood as the drive you have to become something. It does not necessarily include power in the traditional sense, but incapsulates everyth

Another way to put it would be living to the highest standard of our practical selves. I think it is amazing that there are only a few things that really matter to becoming the strongest, most capable and best version of yourself. It can be tempting to think of all the things in life that people want, and how much of it is not available to us, but if we dig down and ask “What would the best version of me have in spades?” I believe there are only three. I call these three the three dimensions of success.

The Dimensions of Success

If you have too many virtues you will become bogged down in having too many goals, and your direction will change constantly. But, neglecting one or more of these crucial dimensions of success will leave your life seriously lacking. As somebody who studied physics in college, I am a huge fan of simplicity and having only a few governing principles. I believe that an arbitraty amount of complexity can arise from only a few simple rules.

Harvard Professor Emeritus Howard H. Stevenson lists three aspects of success and says to think about them as balls to always juggle in his lecture on Building a Life ², In his research on successful people, he found that the four areas that were most important to lifetime success were: happiness, significance, achievement, and legacy. While the lecture is full of good content and is worth a watch, I would like to propose a different set of dimensions for success that I think narrows down the list and makes it a bit more clear.

My three dimensions of success are: career, relationships, and spirituality. Ideally, each one has a decreasing sphere of influence. The way your success affects society is your career. The way your success affects those close to you are in relationships. The interaction of success with yourself is spirituality.

I am open to more here, and to empirical evidence to support or reject these. But I believe that you should be as selfish as possible for all things along these dimensions. Nobody will make these happen for you, and even if they could, you wouldn’t want them to. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Career

This one is the most supported and well understood dimensions of success in our culture. It is what we traditionally think of as “success” if we lazily bring up the term in our mind. The way I define it here, however, is a bit more broad.

I define the career dimension as living up to your potential. It is all the things you “do” amounts to what impact you are able to have on the world. What can you build? Who can you influence? These questions are answered and reflected by the strength of your career.

This is where achievement becomes a large focus. Money, power, status, and fame are all symptoms of a great career. But, they do not themselves define success.

Another way to think about this dimension would be to picture a patch of a forest. Let’s say you want to become a tree, out of all the things in this world you could be. You are a stable person, you think long term, and you capable in being helpful and supporting others, so you become a tree. Now you can succeed in many ways in your career as a tree.

You can house generations of squirrels, birds, and other creatures. You can be the tallest tree in the forest, or the most scenic. But in order to succeed and be the best you can be, you must be honest with yourself that your role is to be a tree.

Questions

Some questions you may want to ask yourself are:

• Am I good at what I do?
• Do I gain respect from people for my work? Do people value my work?
• Am I living up to my potential? Can I do more?

Relationships

This domain is honestly the newest to me. I was of course interested in improving this part of my life, but also thought it was ok to just let happen naturally. It was actually a shock to me that people made an effort to keep relationships open with people outside of doing what feels good. Shocking, right?

Humans are social animals and we almost all have a baseline level of socialability we must maintain for our health. If anything, I think the pandemic has highlighted this fact for many people.

The way I see this is that your relationship health is a factor of how much of yourself you can give to others. This can be anything from giving decades as a parent, to giving half an hour to reach out to a friend on the phone, to even giving up your living situation to be with someone else.

I see success here as a multiplicative effect, which is in part due to Metcalfe’s law. Metcalfe’s Law ³ states that the strength of a network increases by the square of the number of users. Originally applied to telecommunications, I like to extend this to quality of life and relationships. Having several positive relationships in your life can often combine to make things drastically better for yourself.

Of course, there is a limit here due to our mortal nature. We unfortunately have mouths and eyes, not routers and modems for making connections. Scientists have suggested that people tend to form groups of roughly 100 to 150 people. Any larger than that, and the group tends to fracture into sub-groups and separate into a new group.

However, ignoring this area of success entirely is detrimental in several areas. Most Americans cant even name a single close friend. Building and maintaining this network takes a lot of effort, but one friend is so practically so much more than zero, and the benefits continue to increase as you add more relationships.

Questions

Some associated questions would be:

• How many people love me?
• What kind of impact do I have on others?
• If you asked my friends about our relationship, what would they say? What about my parents, children, or my lovers?
• Are there people in my life that I can count on to be there for me, and can count on me?

Spirituality

I believe that this dimension of success is the least emphasized and least understood in our culture. Spirituality does not necessarily mean religion, at least in the way I use it. Here I use spirituality to mean One way to look at spirituality is as the dot product between what you want to be, and what you are.

Questions

• Am I happy? Am I fulfilled by what I do and who I spend time with?
• Can I practice radical acceptance?
• Am I in touch with the natural world?

Making a Measurement

The most difficult challenge in achieving success is honesty. How many of us have thought things are going great, when all of a sudden we get hit by a bout of depression, or a prolonged job search, or a “dry spell”? Frequent and honest evaluation of yourself along these three dimensions is crucial for success.

Of the three dimensions, the easiest to measure is the career by far. The free market determines how successful of a career you have. As you might imagine, plenty of books are written on this subject. If you are interested in learning more about building career success that also brings overall success in the way we define it, I suggest checking out the book What You’re Really Meant to Do by Robert Kaplan ⁴.

The other two: relationships and spirituality are much more difficult to measure. Unfortunately, we do not have a decentrialized system with a currency filled with agents (the free market) to help us evaluate these two. As much as some of us wished it were true, your number of Instagram followers does not measure the success of your relationships. Similarly, just because you go to church twice a week does not make you a spiritually healthy person.

While we will not have close to the same accuracy as you do in the free market, my sense is that these last two can start to be measured by giving questionaires, similarly to a personality test but with questions similar to the ones I gave above.

Helpful Resources

On this journey, there are several things that we can do to maximize our chances of achieving success. Some people think that these are ends, but they are simply tools that you can use that support yourself in getting towards success. Here are some of the biggest tools for achieving success:

• Health - both mental and physical. Physical health is one of the most important factors for life satisfaction and well-being. Diet is huge. Also, go to therapy!
• Journaling - This can be a good time to do honest evaluation of yourself as we discussed earlier, or just vent about life.
• Meditation - Even 10 minutes a day helps you center yourself and calm the mental noise, and also understand your thoughts more. I should be better about this one.
• Reading and learning - This one is not to be done lightly. It is ok to love learning, but there is also something to be said about deliberate learning. One piece of advice that I follow is if you start to lose interest in a book, move on to the next one. Life is too short to finish books that do not interest you.
• Personal Finance - Oh boy, I spent a lot of time reading about this one. Truth be told, you can figure out enough to cover yourself in 90% of situations with just a day’s worth of research. What works for me is to figure out how to “set it and forget it” and do not spend too much time finding the absolute lowest cost index fund and tracking every penny. Having this down greatly increases the stability of your life, and that is what we are after here.

Failure

We can’t talk about success without bringing up the topic of failure. Failure means you are pushing yourself, and is nothing to be ashamed of. It is worth saying, that just because you fail does not make you a bad person, or mean that you will not achieve success as we have defined it here.

I think a healthier way to look at failure is to note wh at the indended outcome was, why you were unable to get there, and then make a note to revisit it in the future. Ultimately our goal is to create a life where we have all of the things we want, and of course failure will come along for the ride.

Sources

1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche ↩

2. Building a Life - Howard H. Stevenson ↩

3. Metcalfe’s Law ↩

4. What You’re Really Meant to Do - Robert Steven Kaplan ↩