The Psychology of Success: Redefining Achievement in Modern Times
Defining Success and Its Psychological Roots
What does it mean to strive for the highest achievement? What psychological factors contribute to your pursuit of reaching your highest achievable potential?
Today, the concept of success is a buzzword, just as it was a virtue in ancient Greece. What is it about being successful that is so eternal and so valuable to us humans? And what is it about human psychology that compels us to seek success, sometimes to the point of obsession, even recklessness?
The answer depends on what you think of when you talk about ‘success’.
You see, there are 3 different definitions through which we define this elusive concept of success. Listen to them and decide which one resonates with you the most:
Cultural vs. True Success: Understanding Different Definitions
There's the cultural definition of success which is represented by money, fame, social status or power. It’s the kind of success that society tells us we need and want. This kind of success is what we could call ‘value neutral.’ It’s not inherently valuable. Your life could get worse with these things, or it could get better.
Then we have success like the dictionary defines it; simply the ability to achieve your aims. This is still basically value neutral. We can have healthy aims or unhealthy aims. If your aim is to seek revenge on your enemy and you succeed - does that make you a successful person? Technically, yes, though it’s not a very valuable or helpful direction.
There’s one other idea of success. When you take the time that most people don’t take, to flip your perspective and define success as a continually growing relationship between your hard work and your fulfillment, then it’s a life-changing perspective to have - it’s inherently valuable.
Tom Morris is a philosophy professor at Notre Dame University. In his book “A New Philosophy of Success,”, he reminds us that “The people who attain true success in their lives are people who enjoy a good measure of both fulfillment and happiness as they invest themselves in worthwhile pursuits.”
Let’s take a pause here and think, how many people can you think of in your life who can say they have attained this kind of true success? It’s not that common, right?
Which is why we call it ‘uncommon success’. It's a kind of success which is defined by a balance between happiness and hard things.
And now you might think that happiness and hard things seem like complete opposites, but they actually feed each other to create true, uncommon success.
The Philosophy of Uncommon Success: Happiness Meets Hard Work
Uncommon success is the process of going through the hard work of pursuing and achieving something that matters to you and makes you happy.
So then the question becomes, “what matters?”
To some extent you get to decide what matters, so it might be that the cultural ideas of success like fame, money, and power suit you. But there’s almost a secret understanding among all humans as to what really matters.
There are some jarring testimonials from some of humanity’s most successful people that reveal the potential shallowness of cultural definitions of success -like money, power and fame- and the unavoidable, deeply human need for ‘uncommon success’. Uncommon successes being family, relationships, freedom, stability, and creativity to name a few
Larry King, an American television host, and successful man by most accounts, said, “Basically, what it comes down to is that I love what I do. I don’t do it for money. I don’t do it for fame.” and this is it. An incredibly wealthy, powerful, and typically successful person has said directly that he doesn’t do it for those things. He does it for the love. As Larry King says, it’s more successful to follow something you love and makes you happy.
In the remaining videos in this series we’re going to explore the path to attaining this sort of ‘value-positive’ and balanced kind of success. The kind of success that seems to matter most to all of us.
This path has 3 main steps; 1. choose a bold goal, 2. construct routines that move you in the direction of your goal, and then 3. consistently execute on those routines.
In this video, we’ll explore how you can achieve Step 1, choosing a bold goal.
By the way, these aren’t random steps; it’s the mirror of a repeated pattern played out by the most fulfilled people. And it’s a pattern you’ll find in most books about success and self-help.
It might not be such a stretch to say that all self help literature preaches the same fundamental ideas - that focus and discipline on the things you love leads to a feeling of success.
Ok, it may be a bit of a stretch, but it will save you a lot of time reading.
What kind of person would you ask for help on how to be successful?? It might seem counterintuitive to take advice on success from a prisoner, but life behind bars often shapes people in surprising ways.
It seems to push people to realize worldly-wisdom and eternal truths.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was an ex-prisoner who wrote a novel on the wisdom he gained while in prison. On goals, he said that “Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live.” which represents the hard work part of our uncommon success equation, but it also shows something directional about the hard work - a goal.
“We must have goals to guide our actions and energies. . .” as Tom Morris writes in his aptly named book ‘the art of achievement’ … “Without a target to shoot at, our lives are literally aimless. Without something productive to do, without positive goals and a purpose, a human being languishes. And then one of two things happens. Aimlessness begins to shut a person down in spiritual lethargy and emptiness, or the individual lashes out and turns to destructive goals just to make something happen.”
-Tom Morris
So what we get from Dostoyevsky and Morris, is that deliberate, well–planned goals are integral to uncommon success.
Because we need to know what it is that we want to do with our lives, and we need something to aim at.
Just like shooting an arrow; we need an intention and a direction, otherwise it's a useless, unmeasurable exercise.
Imagine just working hard on anything and everything that makes you happy; the gardening, a blog post, your friends, baking a chocolate cake, and birdwatching amongst all the other things… you’d be happy, sure, but successful, perhaps not.
Since the goal we choose will become the starting point of our spiraling pattern toward success, we must choose it carefully and deliberately and make it narrow.
And yet, not so narrow that we forget this goal is only the first step on a long journey, and not so narrow minded either that we forget we will have to change our personality many times along the way. An uncommonly successful life is defined by its ability to adapt to uncommon experiences.
So, How do you plan to choose your initiating goal?
Let’s be real, If you’re watching this video, you’re probably toying with the idea of following a designed path to success, and if you're thinking of that, then you’re probably in a blurry place in life right now. You’re probably feeling lost. How do you choose a direction when you feel lost?
Let’s go back to look at the world’s most successful people and see what we can mirror from their lives.
Learning from Legends: Success Stories of Larry King, J.K. Rowling, and Oprah Winfrey
J.K Rowling is famous for her wildly successful Harry Potter stories, but almost equally as famous for her story of rejection. Time and time again she was turned away by publishers, year after year she faced the hardship of a low income and rejection. Yet, publishing the book must’ve meant something deep to her, otherwise she wouldn’t have continued. She had a simple, specific goal and yet ambitious goal that meant a lot.
Oprah Winfrey started life with considerable uncommon challenges. She was abused by her family, and became pregnant at 14, losing the baby soon after birth. However, after her father helped her get to school, she found that she had an aptitude for public speaking and empathy. She took drama classes and stuck to her core passion of helping people for the rest of her sky-rocketing career. Overcoming her past day by day, Oprah continued to follow a specific vision and feeling to help people and be a philanthropic personality. She was ambitious, focused and must’ve felt something moving in her to overcome her early challenges.
We can see a pattern emerging. A 3-point criteria in particular.
The goal must feel intrinsically rewarding
The direction must be ambitious, a little stretch beyond where you currently are
Both the goal and the direction must be specific, detailed and focused
Let’s have a look at the inner workings of each part.
Why is feeling intrinsically rewarding so important to a goal being successful? Well, we all intuitively know the answer to this.
You move towards what you’re interested in regardless of money, status, fame, power, or anything external. Intrinsically rewarding things nurture motivation despite the odds and unpredictabilities of life.
Sure, you move toward things that other people peer pressure you into following as well, but the motivation runs dry at some point.
If you follow extrinsically rewarding ventures, you might tend to do the bare minimum and nothing more, nothing that will help you to go further than ‘good’ and become successful.
As Ayn Rand puts it in her book The Founteinhead:
“…you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.”
Life is uncertain, the future is even more uncertain. If we pin our hopes of success on some arbitrary hope that the future will reward us in some way -like through our family, our friends, our social circle- then we’re pinning our happiness on something dangerously unpredictable. Something we have no control over how it will unfold.
The next step is to ask how do we find an intrinsically rewarding goal? Surprisingly, it’s not always going to be something you enjoy at first. We know from extensive studies that passion follows good performance and results, not vice versa. It seems that feeling passionate is a result of doing good work, not the other way around.
Our psychology is fairly universal in the fact that we feel rewarded and motivated by things we’re good at and praised for.
Have you ever praised or rewarded a child for something and watched a lightbulb switch; they start to focus more, work harder, or at the least, keep moving in that direction.
People tend to set themselves up for failure because they imagine that they will enjoy a certain pursuit, or they think that they should because people they admire do - but because it doesn’t align with their skills and talents they struggle to gain any proficiency and stop feeling motivated by it, they never get to the stage of feeling passionate about it because they never get good enough. Eventually, they give up in frustration, just like a kid.And if this sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone. I have changed 3 career paths so far and I’m working on the 4th one because of that reason.
Finding your skills is the essential foundation to choosing an enduring goal. If you don’t know what you’re good at or innately strong at, there’s no other way around it than to experiment with a variety of pursuits until something clicks.
Once you’ve discovered something that aligns with your strengths- be it technology, computer programming, writing, creating music, raising a family, or climbing mountains- you then need to think ambitiously.
Ambition has this sly way of nourishing inspiration, hope, and excitement into everything we do toward our goal - just like a spark that gets fanned everytime we focus on it.
It’s a thrilling, and quite addictive feeling which is perfect fuel for taking uncommon and brave actions that lead to uncommon success.
Nietzsche, said that:
“One man’s greater morality, in contrast to another’s, often lies only in the fact that his goals are quantitatively larger. The other man is pulled down by occupying himself with small things. . .”
What he means is that some people’s success can be traced back to goals focused on bigger, more ambitious things than people who appear to have less success.
So, how do we determine whether our goal is ambitious enough to accelerate us beyond simple ‘good work’ and into uncommon success ? There’s a daring question you can ask to reveal the true trajectory of your ambition;
If you attain your goal will it merely augment your well-being, or will it radically change you (and perhaps, the world around you)?
Unless you can be certain that the achievement of your goal will change things in your life and the lives around you for the better then your goal is not big enough to reach uncommon success.
“The higher the goal, the less competition there will be”. That’s what Tim Ferriss teaches us in The Four Hour Work Week, and this is true especially for anyone interested in entrepreneurial-related goals.
“Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming … The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals …”
-Tim Ferris
Carving Your Path: How to Set and Achieve Ambitious Goals
By now you should be close to having an ambitious goal that feels intrinsically rewarding, you have the perfect concoction of meaning and motivation that will propel you quite close to ‘uncommon success’. All that’s left in designing your goal is to make it specific.
As an old Greek proverb goes - “You can’t hold two watermelons with one hand””
Multiple goals or even a single goal that is too complex will only add unnecessary complications to your pursuit of uncommon success. Your vision needs to be clear, precise, and calculated. Orison Swett Marden once said : “
“Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.”
Have you ever written your goal down?
If you have, you might’ve found it quite hard to convey exactly all the small pieces of ideas and directions and threads of information in the space of a paragraph.
If you haven’t tried - try now! Try to get it all across in the space of one YouTube comment below the video here. The thing is, writing helps us toclarify our ideas like whittling a wooden knife down from an entire tree.
But, we don’t just want to write anything for anyone. We want to make sure our idea can be properly understood by a third party -someone who doesn’t know us at all. It needs to almost sound like a set of instructions.
Since our goal should start to sound like a set of instructions, it’s a good idea to add a provisional deadline to it as well. The task expands to the time allotted to it, and if there’s no sense of time constraint in reaching your uncommon success, then it has the potential to take a lifetime.
And, we assume you want to reach some uncommon success within a time-frame you can enjoy it! Clarity of destination always increases the chance of arrival.
One of the key pieces of literature on the subject of successful goals is “the 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey. Covey writes that
“An effective goal . . .identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do. And it can finally translate itself into daily activity so that you are proactive, you are in charge of your life, you are making things happen each day -the things that will enable you to fulfill your [goal].”
In other words, a successful, achievable goal is like a map of where you are and where you want to be.
So, let’s assume that we have a goal that meets our criteria, which to recap, is that
The goal must feel intrinsically rewarding
The direction must be ambitious, a little stretch beyond where we currently are
Both the goal and the direction must be specific, detailed and focused like a photo
How do we then start moving forward in the direction of its accomplishment? It's all very well planning things out and writing things down, but nobody ever became successful through logic alone.
Moving Forward: Transforming Goals into Daily Routines for Success
We need systems and routines that turn our otherwise directionless days into building blocks. We need to act on our days instead of our days acting on us.
To reach uncommon success, we need to take some kind of real-life, uncommon action. And this hands-on, exhilarating execution will be the topic of our next video where we will lay out the path one day at a time.
If you liked this episode hit the like button and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’m Dimitris, and I share tools and insights on how to design a well-lived life.