500 Words a Week - Is our idea of success wrong?
Is what we think of success wrong? We tend to define success in terms of achieving goals. Generally centring around the external; money, fame, status, a big house or a nice car. This view of success pulls us further into a goal focused life, constantly worrying about achieving external accolades, constantly putting off happiness and saying to ourselves “I’ll be happy when I achieve …”
In “The Confidence Gap” by Russ Harris, he highlights three problems with living a goal focused life. First, there’s no guarantee you’ll achieve your goals, or these goals may be a long way off, leading to chronic feelings of frustration and disappointment. Second, even if you do it, it won’t give you lasting happiness, you’ll will get a moment of satisfaction before you then start to think about the next goal you need to achieve. Finally, you will constantly put yourself under tremendous pressure to keep achieving your goals. As long as you then keep achieving your goals, you can label yourself as successful. What happens if you stop achieving? What happens if you are unsure if you really want that goal you set yourself? You then become a failure, a loser.
Russ states it’s this popular notion of success that creates fragile self-esteem. Where we base our image of ourselves on how we are performing. If we are performing well and achieving our goals, our self-esteem is high. If our performance drops, and our goals begin to fade into the distance, our self-esteem comes tumbling down.
Russ puts forward a different approach to thinking about success. True success as per Russ is living by your values. We constantly get opportunities to be successful, as in any moment we can act on our values. “When living by our values becomes the definition of success it means we can be successful right now”.
Ultimately, at your funeral, what will people say about you? They won’t comment on your job, or the goals you achieved. They will comment on your values, your character, and what you stood for in life.
Establishing values also helps us identify what we want to do with our life. We can quickly identify when something doesn’t align.
I don’t normally like when books include little exercises for you do to, however I did enjoy the following exercise to help identify your values from Russ. Skip straight to “A Quick Look at Your Values – page 1” on page 3/5.
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value” - Albert Einstein
