#25: You don't know what 'success' means until you know who you are

We talk about success and failure all the time. You're probably in the habit of telling yourself that you'll never succeed, or that other people are more successful than you are. But do you actually know what you mean when you say things like this? Unless you have a clear conception of who you are and what you care about, you have no idea. Join The Academic Imperfectionist to cut through the bullshit stories we tell ourselves about success and failure, and find out how to write your own rules.

You can find the Wheel of Life and the Core Values exercises on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website.

There's a free, online version of William James's Principles of Psychology here.

Galen Strawson's Aeon article about life as a narrative (or not) is here.

Episode transcript:

Do you care about being successful? You probably don’t even know what it means.

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

Do you know what the word ‘success’ means? It’s a word that we tend to use a lot, in all sorts of ways. Sometimes we talk about success, and being successful, as involving meeting a set of standards that are somehow universally agreed upon, or at least widely accepted within a certain culture or community. So, we’ll talk, often without further qualification, about people who make a lot of money as being successful, or people who manage to do whatever it takes to progress in a particular field--sport, music, academia, finance--as being successful. Often, too, we distinguish between the objective form of success and a more subjective, personal form, as when we say things like, ‘I don’t care about being successful’. What we mean when we say something like that is not, ‘I don’t care if I don’t have the things I care about’, but rather, ‘I don’t care about the things that most people associate with success’. Sometimes we use the word very narrowly, to refer to doing well at one very specific challenge, as when we talk about success in a job interview. Other times, we use it more generally, almost as if it’s a character trait--so, we have the idea of a ‘successful person’, who we continue to regard as successful despite suffering the odd setback here and there.

We don’t always use the word ‘success’ when we’re talking about success, though. Often we talk about the flip side of it, and use the word ‘failure’ instead. Again, that’s a word that we use in all sorts of different ways: to refer to a universal set of standards or to a more personal, subjective set; to refer to how we did at a particular task or what we’re like more globally as a person, and so on.

Our inner critic loves to talk to us about success and failure. She likes it best when she can get away with using those terms in as vague a way as possible, without anyone trying to pin her down to explain exactly what she means by them. You’re probably familiar with her telling you that you’re a failure, that you’ll never succeed, that everyone else is more successful than you are, that if you weren’t such a failure she wouldn’t be so mean to you, and so on. Ever stopped to ask her exactly what she means when she tells you that you’re a failure? Like, a failure at what, exactly? And by what standards is she judging you--do you ever ask her? No? I thought not. So, let’s walk through it all here, shall we?

The message I want to start from is this. You can’t go on using the words ‘success’ and ‘failure’ without knowing exactly what those words mean for you. I say ‘for you’ because what you mean when you talk about success and failure is different from what anyone else means when they talk about success and failure. At least, they ought to be. If you’re using them in a generic, same-for-everyone kind of way, they’re meaningless. Used in that way, those words are nothing more than tools to make you feel bad. You may as well just put a stone in your shoe and walk around, or poke yourself in the eye with a stick. Seriously, that’s about all the good you’re doing.

So, how do you work out what the words ‘success’ and ‘failure’ mean for you? Well, you need to start by working out who you are, and what you care about. Because you can’t succeed at everything. You already know that, even if you and your inner critic never acknowledges it explicitly. When it comes to evaluating success, we intuitively take account of what sort of things it’s possible to achieve within a human lifetime. That’s why we tend not to sneer at Nobel Prize winners by saying things like, ‘Yeah that’s all very impressive but how many 100-metre sprinting records did they break? None: what a failure’. And we don’t roll our eyes at Booker Prize winners and say ‘But this writer is a shit harpsichord player’. And if we heard news about some scientist or other discovering a cure for cancer, we wouldn’t sit there muttering, ‘I’m saving my congratulations until I’ve seen how good she is at levitating’. We understand that winning a Nobel Prize or the Booker Prize or curing cancer is enough impressive activity for one lifetime. We understand that a conception of success that required superhuman feats would be meaningless. What’s less obvious to us is that unless success is relativised to some particular domain or set of values, it’s also meaningless: it can still be a word that we throw sloppily around as a proxy for how impressed we are with a person or an achievement, sure, but it’s completely unhelpful as a standard that we expect ourselves to meet. The key message is this: success is about identity.

The 19th century philosopher and psychologist William James had some useful comments here. In his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, he had this to say (brace yourself for a longish quotation):

‘Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a “tone-poet” and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. [...] Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.’

The lesson here is this: to succeed, you need first to decide who you are and what you care about. Then, your standard of success is relativised to whatever version of yourself you’ve chosen to try to actualise. Not only that, but--says James--you also need to suppress those possible versions of yourself that you’ve decided not to develop. If you’re going for the Nobel Peace Prize, forget about that 100-metre record. You can’t do it all. You need to choose. Here’s what James had to say about his own choices and their consequences for his standards of success: ‘I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I “pretensions” to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.’

What does this mean for you? It means that unless you’re absolutely clear about who you are and what you care about, you can’t even begin to know what success is. You don’t know what you’d need to do to get there. If you’re using the words ‘success’ and ‘failure’ without having first got clear about these things, you have no idea what you’re on about. Those words are just sticks you’re using to beat yourself with--and while you’re beating yourself with them, you’re not even giving yourself any guidance about what you’d need to do in order not to be beaten with them. The fact is that the word ‘success’ means ‘the version of myself that I want to create’. That’s all it means. And so, if you’re confused about what version of yourself you want to create, you don’t get to talk about whether or not you’re successful. Decide who you are and what you care about first, and then you can think about what ‘success’ might be. If you need help with working out who you are and what you care about, there’s a couple of worksheets you should check out on the ‘Resources’ page of my website: Wheel of Life and Identify Your Core Values. I’ll put links to both of those in the episode notes.

Now, don’t think that you can relax after working out who you are and what you care about, and never consider these questions again. This shit evolves, and you need to keep up with it. I’d suggest revisiting the Wheel of Life and Core Values exercises every 6 months to a year, just to check in with yourself and work out if anything important has changed. Now, don’t roll your eyes--this can actually be a fun and rewarding task, so put your feet up and make time for it. It’s important because, when you change, so does your conception of success. And if you change in some important way and don’t notice, you risk striving for some version of success that simply isn’t relevant to you any more.

Coincidentally, I came across a wonderful illustration of how this happens a couple of days ago. Lee Chalmers, who is an old friend and a successful coach, posted on her Instagram page about how she’s made the decision to quit the PhD that she’s been working on part-time for six years. In the past 18 months, she’s taken her coaching business in a new direction--creating courses to help midlife women achieve their potential--and she’s broken up with her husband too. Who she is now is not who she was when she embarked on the PhD, and she realised that allowing herself to be bound by the values and goals set by that old version of herself was stifling her. Becoming Dr Chalmers was important to the success of the old Lee, but it’s not important to the current version. The current version succeeds in other ways.

Now, Lee’s story is a happy one. She changed, she noticed that she’s changed (it took time, that happens), and she revised her version of success, which means that she now gets to direct her time and energy towards realising the version of herself that she wants to create, rather than towards realising the version of herself that the 6-years-ago Lee wanted to create--because what a waste of time and energy that would be. You need to do this too. You need to recognise when the version of yourself that you want to create changes, and adjust your conception of success accordingly. Because if you don’t, you end up stuck in a prison that you don’t even know you’ve created for yourself.

I’ve seen problems relating to this ‘prison’ again and again in my coaching clients. A lot of the people who come to me for coaching are successful in a generic, impersonal sense: they have climbed the career ladder, they have gained recognition and respect in a particular field, they have published books, earned money, won awards. And very often they come to me because they realise that none of this has made them happy, and they want to move in a different direction--although they’re often not yet sure which direction. But although they’re not sure exactly what they want to be and where they want to direct their lives, a lot of them say something like the following: ‘Whatever I do next needs to be somehow linked to what I’ve done before, otherwise what I’ve been doing up until now has all been for nothing’. So, for example, if they’ve been a psychologist up until now, they tell themselves that whatever they do next has to draw on their experience and expertise as a psychologist, or if they’ve been an artist up until now, they have to do something artistic next too. I’m always struck by what an incredibly limiting pattern of thinking this is. These smart people have spent years excelling in some field, and yet, instead of allowing that accumulated excellence to open doors and create opportunities for them, they allow it to constrain what they do next. This happens because they are unwilling to let go of the version of themselves that they set about creating years or even decades ago. You end up with 40-something people trying to contort themselves to fit a template for success that they came up with in their 20s. You don’t have to do that; nobody does. You’re allowed to change--in fact, it’s inevitable--and when you do, you need to change what you take success to mean. That doesn’t mean that everything that happened before is wasted. Why would it? You don’t have to live your life as if it were a novel or a movie, with a single narrative from beginning to end--the philosopher Galen Strawson has written about this, and I’ll put a link to an article of his in the episode notes. You can, instead, live your life like a trilogy of related narratives. Or like a collection of short stories or poems. Or like a DJ set. Or like a Spotify playlist of songs that bear no relationship whatsoever to each other except that you happen to like them.

Life is easier and more fulfilling when you’re not trying to live up to a set of standards that you didn’t choose, and that you might not even care about. You can and should create your own set of standards, which is to say, your own conception of success. But it starts with self-knowledge. Go and get it.

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!

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#24: Your inner critic is not a videogame boss