When I was a kid, I dreamed of being ‘successful’. When I visualized this, I saw lots of money, lots of smiling strangers, mansions, nice clothes, things like that. It’s pretty funny because I only saw things that represent one aspect of success. So, if I attain that vision, I will definitely have succeeded at something, but will I have succeeded in a general sense? Maybe, maybe not. Not a good enough answer.
A couple of problems with my old way of thinking: (1) I lacked money and I had problems -> naturally I thought money was the solution. More money, no more problems; yet, common sense is all over our media – more money, more problems right. Anyway, the point is I was biased. (2) I never defined success – it was just an abstract term – how can I achieve something that isn’t defined? Success sounds nice, so I want it. That’s as deep as my thinking went. Number 2 is the more pressing issue now, but I’m sure in another life I would say number 1 if that was more urgent.
Luckily, that was me as a child – a good enough starting point. My thinking really became ordered after I graduated college. In 2019, I started reading more deeply into writings of Stoic philosophers. As I read, I realized my baseline personality / way of living was fairly stoic – but man was I far from the ideal. I encourage everyone to take a good look at stoicism – a couple of its main points are below (paraphrased from memory so might be rough). Also, I’ll put a link to the actual book I own.
- Virtue is all you need to be happy - everyone has the tools to pursue virtue
- We can't control what happens, but we can control how we feel about stuff
- We should live according to nature (example, humans are social, so we shouldn't live in isolation)
This book changed my life because it gave me words and concepts to clearly express ideas that had never been more than ‘gut feelings’ and intuitions. Before, it’s like I was wandering through a maze and only looking at what’s right in front of me – I was reaching key checkpoints, but I think there was too much luck involved (I didn’t even realize I was in a maze). The way I imagine it now is like a drone flying up over – I can see that it’s a maze, even some of the upcoming obstacles to a distance (I bet as I get older I’ll be able to see farther). I’m way more efficient, I’ll still make mistakes, but I’ll also avoid a couple of total dead ends.
There’s one idea from the stoicism book I want to explore here – the idea that virtue is complete in itself – there aren’t tiers or ranks. When you have it, you have all of it. If you have it, no other condition can take that claim of being virtuous away – the virtuous peasant is equally complete as the virtuous aristocrat. Of course, add being virtuous to the list of things I want to achieve in life – it’s too awesome.
Anyway, with the help of this idea I can better say what success is to me. I want my success to have a feeling of completeness, a sort of balance, similar to but obviously inferior to the perfect harmony of being virtuous. What does this mean? I’ll try to explain, but I think each day has to be a success / part of the success – let’s work backwards.
First of all, success needs to involve all the things I care about – family, self-awareness / self-realization, virtue, health, monetary wealth, teaching – all at the same time. Why be rich with no family or healthy but alone? It needs to be all because otherwise I will have failed at something. I won’t compromise, this is the only life I have. Success also can’t be a status I achieve at some point in the future and then from that day on I’m successful. There’s room in that definition to die a failure. I need to know that when I die I’ll be successful, whenever that is – let’s say 50 years from now. What if it’s 10 years sooner, okay 40 years from now. 10 years sooner? We can keep subtracting days until we are at tomorrow. It’s obvious why I need it all, and now. If I am 26, and it’s only within my means to be X successful in this and Y successful in that – that’s great. That’s the best I can do and I’ll gladly take it. As I have the opportunity to age, I’ll just take all these things I care about and slowly level them up – mostly in sync with some margin for error. Eventually, I may have more of all the things I like but I won’t be ‘more successful’ because I will have already established my success today.
That’s the goal. Honestly, I didn’t realize this until pretty recently. Real life doesn’t move as fast as thoughts. There’s some friction associated with aligning the entirety of how I live to be true to the ideas I just described. I’ll take reaching this point in my thoughts as an intermediate win, though. If you read all of this and think I’m full of crap, I’ll just say, whatever success means to you, work hard at it, and I sincerely hope you get there.
