Redefining “Success”

Note: This is a journal entry from May 2019. It’s pretty raw but I am sharing it here because I still think about it just about every week.

After my therapy session yesterday I'm thinking a lot about success. I asked if I should just let go of the concepts of success and failure, and my therapist said there's much more power in reclaiming and redefining them, which tracks for me.

Here is my rough translation of my therapist’s notes from our conversation in the session:

Success and Failure are important concepts evolutionarily, because they give us a way to organize meaning in ways that either increase or decrease our chances for survival.

In the distant (tribal) past, success was a function of cooperation with the community. Guilt was an effective tool to guide people to stay in bounds of the tribe's rules. Bravery and self-sacrifice were valued, heroism earned you respect.

Success took physical energy, spent during sunlight hours, and daring to go gather or hunt the food to bring back to the tribe. Failure meant the tribe doesn't survive, so it's better to die trying than to fail.

In modern times, success means gathering enough resources to give yourself options. In our society, that comes in the form of stockpiling money, status, and power.

The way to get this success is hyper-focus at the expense of balance. It requires strategic thinking. It requires energy 24 hours a day, in non-circadian ways that demand sharpness of thinking at all times. This leads to a tendency to reward narcissism and sociopathy.

As for me, I've always defined success and failure as a function and judgment of other people.

I've tried to use the past guidelines of success and define them as moral imperatives, and impose those rules in environments that use modern definitions of success. This has led to a lot of pain as I didn't get to choose either of those definitions, they don't mesh well with each other, and I wound up allowing myself to be crushed in the middle.

In jobs, I'd hold myself to these past tribal, self-sacrificing heroism-as-success standards. Then, I'd wait to see if my boss, supervisor, or decision-maker was happy with my work. At first, they would be, but eventually, the sociopathic, modern definitions of success that the work environment actually values would become more distant from my own values and I'd have to lean on my willpower to bridge the gaps. 

But willpower is finite, and I'd start running out of steam. And in trying to get an A in all the areas of my life, I'd start to see my grades (as defined by people I let sit in judgement of me) slip... and start feeling worse and worse about myself. My own needs and values became fuzzier, more distant, and less visible to me as the looming fear of failure grew larger. 

Failure was the sense that the person in charge would tell me I'm not meeting their expectations. And as that fear grew larger my thinking became less clear, until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the in-charge person would inevitably tell me they were not pleased with my performance. It had finally happened. I was failing. 

This thing that seemed like an opportunity to succeed had turned into a failure. I had failed. I failed. I fail. That's what I do. Because that's what I am.

All I can do is run from failure until I run out of energy and it inevitably catches up with me. When I look around, I assume successful people are made of different stuff than me. They have more stamina to keep running. Or they aren't hampered by my deficiencies or hangups.

But what do I actually want for myself? It isn't to keep running from failure and hoping that I magically conjure up new stamina. 

Back to my notes, my therapist wrote the question:

Is “success” as I’ve defined in the past actually success?

When I defined success, it's actually this:

The impression I leave behind that lives beyond my individual survival.

Success is relational. Success is balanced. Success is learning and growth. Success is living into my values. Success is bringing light into the lives of others.

Failure is the absence of these at a point in time. Failure is not permanent. Failure is data. Failure does not have the power to reduce my chances of survival.

I cannot help that I will be judged and graded by other people. From the outside, what most people see of my life is success, by modern definitions. I have the ability to give myself and my family options, but since I've always defined success externally, there was never a chance I'd reach it, because it's about the next grade from the next person.

If I can actually internalize my own definition of success, then I might be able to accept the fact that I've already succeeded beyond my own dreams and every day puts more success easily within reach.

What if I could find joy in these daily successes and let them sing me to sleep, instead of lying awake worrying about the potential for failure (by my old definitions) in the coming day?