Success: A societal progress report
What is your definition of success?
Take a moment to think about it. Your work, personal, relationship, hobby success.
How do you evaluate and rate it? What are the indicators and what constitutes progress?
What do you require to feel successful? Feedback? Reward? Recognition? Respect? Promotion? Reputation?
Is it possible to improve in your work but not get any of those things? Does this make you any less successful? When it comes to our indicators of success, they seem to be things that are given to us, external things.
People argue that success is personal and dependent on how one feels about what one does and this may be true. But more often than not, without some of the various forms of payment and recognition, even the best feelings of successful work seem to fade.
Now, if the indicators of success are the external ones mentioned above and no one mentions the excellent work, no added income, no pat on the back, no shiny new title on the business cards or articles written in the local paper, can someone be successful?
There seems to be a conflict between what is success and how we commonly evaluate and measure success. If all the reports come back that I am a failure or no one even bothered to look or care, even the best work of a lifetime can suddenly seem meaningless. What is the point of pushing if no one notices?
On top of this, those indicators of success are also tied to our available resources in life. What we can buy, where we can live, which school our children can attend. Pretty soon, these too become indicators of success.
So what do we do? Do we stay true to our best work or do we look to satisfy the indicator requirements? Do we compromise our best work for positive feedback? How long is it before our satisfying of indicators takes precedence over our personal definition of success?
In time, the indicators change their requirements and to satisfy them, one must often move further and further away from the personal requirements. Soon success becomes the satisfaction of the external indicators. Achievement in what others want.
I think this is why so many people can get promotions, travel the world, drive nice cars, wear fancy clothes, keep winning yet, still feel somewhat empty. Like something is missing. So then they go out to satisfy more indicators. They buy their dream home, get married, have a couple of kids and yet, it is still not enough.
Maybe the bank account is not big enough, the job title not important enough the car not large enough or the power held too low. Perhaps, the brands are not exclusive enough, the jewels not shiny enough, the shoes not fashionable enough. More achievement is obviously necessary. Success becomes a drug and progression the vein, and everyone looks on in envy wishing they had a piece of a successful life too.
Is this success?
If I think about this for just a moment, who is the beneficiary? At one point my success depended on how I felt about my work yet now, it depends on a continual ramping up of my consumptive habits and, what I need to consume to feel successful, is defined by others. I have no control over it.
Consumption to achieve. Consumption as success.
Who benefits again?
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Building the Adelaide Steem community is success for me. Set a new record of 18 last Thursday, thanks to @galenkp and @stuffing coming along.
I'll consider myself 'successful' when we have to change venues :)
I have heard that it is going well there. I think #teamaustralia are doing a pretty good job and Adelaide is leading the way (like usual) :)
Hello @tarazkp.
Not every success is genuine. I wrote earlier "when success doesn't feel like success" after reading about celebrities who had committed suicide or on antidepressants despite their booming success.
Genuine success is the one achieved according to very personal measures regardless of any material and immaterial, the individual define what and what to do what he loves and the feeling of success is immediate and independent of what other perceive. The another type is the in-genuine when we seek others' acknowledgment which is egoic, insatiable and leaves us with the feeling that there is something missing.
Yes. The celebrity success is generally a road to disaster as almost by definition, they are attention/approval seekers. This means that they are always on the chase but the industry is a hard one with many ups and downs and a hell of a lot of public and private criticism. On top of this, they are often artistic by nature which often comes coupled with addictive personalities, passion and freedom of emotion.
Actually, I took the celebrity as example, there are many others who are successful according to society's measures and suffer the same problems celebrities do.
It is about finding the success that is most meaningful to you on personal level. Let's think of a family/society that imposes some kind of success on its members. No matter how far they would go with this success it wouldn't feel like the kind one chooses for himself.
The real problem is that people blindly follow the social predefined success without being sure if it is exactly what they want.
People of course will always raise their living standards after they reach new goals. Since humans long for limitless/boundless expansion. But the work will always be the most gangster thing you can do in life. But a person usually forgets how good work made them feel and one day they wake up everyday asking how they can please and stimulate themselves as the new form of happiness.
But work and engagement will always be what will give the best feeling in the long run. There is a good book about that called flow. But humans forget very quick how fun the work is when you are pushing into your edge. It can be a challenge to find that edge. But that is what makes life fun. It's suppose to be hard. The hard is what makes it great.
Most look for an easy life, a life free from hardship and discomfort but when they look back, it is the difficulty that defines them. These days, many people have such soft lives that what they think is difficulty, is no more than annoyance to those in the past. We are reducing what we are able to face and overcome in this world.
Good question, thank you!
Success is defined in every experienced moment of the present existence. Yesterday I had a consultation with a young man who had not yet orientated himself professionally, but had his first experiences in the working world. He used words like "I've been jerked around" and "I won't take it anymore!". I said, "These are the words of a victim." Then I raised my hand and pressed against his arm. He just let it happen without giving me any resistance. I said, "what did you find out? .... "And you didn't put any pressure on me. That's what people do every day. They're pushing your boundaries. If you let them, they'll push until it hurts."
He was shocked! That was my intention. He said: "But this is not the case in the culture I come from!" I said: "Great! it's good that you can see it so clearly. Everybody does it every day, every minute. It's normality. It's not always malicious. You do it, I do it. People are like that.
Learn to have good experiences in your life. Learn to negotiate. If you fail in your negotiation, this is a good experience that you will take with you next time."
We went very well and deeply in this spontaneous consultation hour, with which we both did not expect.
I have accepted my authority at this hour as self-evident and that I can lead this young man. I told him some uncomfortable truths, but with a positive basic feeling that he already knows about it and just wants it confirmed. Most young people are very open to someone who knows what they are doing and who is not afraid of them.
I said: "A day is a good day when sixty to seventy percent of it has gone well and you tolerate the rest of resistance, uncomfortable experiences and stumbling blocks being paved. There is no right to freedom from interference."
For me, success is therefore not a definition but an experience on which I can exert influence. It's a lifelong process. I can only know what it is when I have the experience of failure.
.....
P.S. thinking in terms of verbs not nouns. ;-)
Success can only really be evaluated in hindsight, looking back at what has been accomplished. If one is in the moment and living it fully, there is no way to evaluate whether what one is doing is successful or not, there is just the flow of action.
These days, people spend so much time worrying about what the world is doing to them that they do not live in the moment nor consider what they are doing to the world. The victim mentality is growing as the mind, body and emotions weaken in their ability to deal with even the slightest of pressures.
Have you had moments in the making of which you already knew that this is an occasion for joy and something that you said or created was of great beauty?
if fully experiencing it, how could one know? it is only in reflection of the moment (not being in the moment itself) that it would be possible to evaluate.
Um.
Take the minutes you're restoring an old car. You bumped out a fender and during the fine work - in the process of light hammering and tapping you feel how it succeeds. You know you got a flow right now. ... In relation to a longer process: yes, there it is as you say. I would have liked to hear an example from your life. That's all.
How is that almost everything you write PROVOKES deep thoughts to the last word?
Success is a dark lord with powers to enslave those of us (read most) who misinterpret the meaning. Human beings are greedy by default and in a society where materialized success is everything, they are bound to chase after this success phantom. I think that's how most of us are full of regrets at old age.
I don't know. Perhaps we are all holding back, locking away our true selves and as I look for mine publicly, you see the reflection. It is very possible that at the core, under the layers of society, culture, and experience, we are all essentially the same. Finding me, is finding you.
Finding yourself is truly helping me find myself. Thank you :)
You just described my 30s
Then I started to meditate, do volunteer work, give back to my community. Now 'm trying to find my spiritual self, and foster better relationships.
Life is an interesting journey, isn't it?
It is indeed an interesting journey with a surprising end, as there is nowhere really to go.
For most people success is measured in terms of material possesions - how much money do you have in the bank, how nice is your car etc. But for me a huge part of success comes down to quality of life. Career satisfaction is a big one - I studied marketing and started to work in that area and wasnt happy (although I probably could have earned alot more money) and retrained as an early childhood teacher and havent looked back!
The way I look at it as that we are only here for limited time so why spend so much of that time chasing money and possesions - to me these arent that important. Sure there are going to be times in life where we will struggle with money and that can be stressful - but id rather this than spend my whole life chasing something that wont generate happiness for me
A Ferrari would be pretty cool to own though. Chase on! 😏🏎
LOL I guess it would be nice but in the scheme of things it wouldnt make me happier - just faster :P
laughing! very good
:P Glad I made you laugh !
It is a good outlook and a hard path in some ways, the only real path in others :)
So much of the world is dictated by our ability to purchase including health and education which means there has to be some kind of balance found. Maybe it shouldn't be this way but, it is currently. I hope that we can do our part in changing it a little to be more about human growth and less about impression of advancement.
Thanks! Yeah I agree there does need to be a balance - and sometimes it comes down to being able to manage the money you have and prioritise where your money goes.
For me the recognition for the things I do was always the messure for success, not even material things.. I live in a country where everything's so complicated than focusing on material things to feel good or living the dream suddenly faded away. Either way I can tell that even as I grew up and things were more normal, I always felt that need of recognition.. I had a wonderful job and there was a point in which i noticed it was impossible to grow since my labor had zero recognition, no one knew nothing from me.. Frankly I've struggled with the subject. For a time I even felt weird and guilty like "is it bad that I want people to praise me for my work?"... But after a while i've been working on myself, and I can finally say i'm good at what I do, I love what I do and I have skills that maybe others don't since we are all gifted in different ways. When I started sending that positive message to myself I started feeling finally succesfull.
I feel like i base my success on how happy i am. Am i achieving my goals, that sort of thing. Trying not to worry about what others think. Great article @tarazkp!
It is a challenge for a human that requires a community to survive.