The Secret of Success
I try to post something every two weeks but over this past month and a half I have had the hardest time finishing a thought. 6 weeks ago I was about to press publish on an essay espousing my view on success when I learned a good friend had passed away.
I generally scoff at most old psychological theory but when I heard of my friend’s passing, the 5 stages of grief hit me like a tsunami. I tried to deny the reality of his death, I angrily punched my mattress in vain, asked the universe for my friend back and spent the rest of the day in a gut-wrenching malaise.
If you aren’t from the DFW area you may not have heard of this young man’s passing but if you are you saw this (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dfw/obituary.aspx?n=barrett-martin-havran&pid=149381350&fhid=4250) and immediately felt remorse for the loss of a selfless man.
My good friend was successful by anyone’s definition. He wasted no moments of his life, no time for frivolity, all endeavors pointed effortlessly towards a larger purpose, towards success.
In loss, grief and acceptance I learned that the best recovery comes with laughter and sharing. Telling my friend’s story, talking about the amazing things he did with his life and the sometimes ridiculous moments we created together; laughing hard with his friends and family, having strangers send me “hugs” via email, twitter and facebook all helped lift the veil of grief. One old client left me a voicemail, sharing his sympathy and offering support, which I received while I was driving from the funeral down the highway. It made me cry almost to the point of needing to stop my car. Out of nowhere people that love me asked to share a burden that wasn’t theirs to bare.
On the first draft of this essay, before my friend’s passing, I considered referencing a dictionary to give the trite: here is what Webster’s says success means and then make a personal appeal to the contrary but that is hackneyed and I’ll spare you.
My vision of success has taken wild turns since I was 8 when I wanted to become a Catholic Priest. As I got older I was pushed to “be something;” to be a doctor or businessman. At 10 years old I was schooled in the basic tenets of retail sales: location, advertisement, loss-leaders, display, management and branding. It would have been easy to go that way.
I grew up attending a private high school where I was accepted socially but never with the status of one of the rich kids. I went to class with individuals who would have become instant billionaires if their parents had died . Who you wear, what you drive, where you vacation, who you know…all seemed important to us as high school kids because these things seemed important to our parents. What we wanted and expected was to be rich and have spectacular things. I have never cared as much as others about the material things but what I really wanted was to influence others with power, status and innovative thinking. Becoming a doctor was an automatic bid into the life of leadership I desired.
From the first time I said out loud I wanted to go into medicine, I could always feel equal to anyone anytime by just saying the words: I’m going to be a doctor. In college I worked moderately hard, on occasion, and managed to easily get accepted into a good medical school. A week prior to matriculation I hit a brick wall suddenly realizing that I was going into medicine for the money, the look and the prestige. I had spent 10 years of work forging a path for all the wrong reasons. I rescinded my med school agreement and was immediately lost again. I no longer knew what I wanted and no longer had something to say to counteract the pressure of my bubble-world, my friends and my family’s expectations.
For the past 20 years, all of my interactions, thoughts and actions have been referenced and juxtaposed against medicine, it’s pursuit, inclusion and exclusion. I was unwilling to let go of my dream or even entertain other goals or visions lest I be seen as less important than those around me. I now stand outside of a profession I loved but chose clearly to reject.
After all that, I asked: what now? Should I still seek what others want or expect of me? Do I redefine my pursuit or did I ever really want what I was chasing? Better yet, what is success?
Living in the present is transparent and contagious. I see envy in the eyes of others who covet the moments I spend with those who have something beautiful to share.
When I wrote the post What Do You Love? I organically produced a personal mantra that has not left my mind – “I love to elicit excitement and joy in those who elicit excitement and joy in me.” It was always a part of me but by processing my own life and interests I was able to distill my motivation to one phrase, a credo in brief. If you have not, please read the article and ask yourself some hard questions. You may be surprised by the answers your unconscious mind gives you in return.
Take a journey with me, for a moment, and discard your old definition of success. Ask your heart if success has anything to do with material things. Let the constructed veneer go. Let yourself be free. Think about your mantra, your credo and while holding it in your head, use it as the window to see what real success looks like.
Today, for me, success is:
One genuine smile evoked,
One sincere question asked,
One heartfelt compliment given,
One mutual hug,
One selfless act.
Today that is enough. Today, that is everything.
I can have the best day of my life if lived with simplicity, selflessly pursuing connection through interest and joy.
I believe real success is available for us right now, in each moment. All we have to do is act on the desires of our heart.
If I live to share positive emotion with those who are receptive to it, I will live the best life I possibly can. In the process, everyone who I touch will connect with their sphere of influence in a better way, connecting me to the rest of the world, making it a better place, one successful moment at a time.
The Secret:
Form your own definition of success.
A cop out? Hell no. Simple, yes, but powerful nonetheless.
Don’t rely on plagiarized BS like: I want to be rich or a doctor or I want to be famous. Don’t rely on the trite vision you copied off of someone else’s bio or obit. Instead – investigate, explore, be curious and love, live, be free; form a vision of success that derives from within. Don’t listen to the self-help PMA (positive mental attitude) cheerleaders (like Tony Robbins) who tell us to use models (other people who are outwardly successful) and to do exactly what these models do. Even identical twins have different lives from the time their zygote splits. You cannot be someone else. It’s futile, why even try. Attempting to be like someone else is boring, irrational and why would you ever let someone else define you?
Today, grab success from the inside, not the outside. I am successful right now because I am happy with who I am, who I strive to be and moments I share with others. It has taken me 34 years to find this; I’ve gone way up, way down, and I have been dragged by the bus through depression but in the end I’m thankful for the crashing waves. Without the vicissitudes of the past I wouldn’t know how good I have it now . If I had never sunk my feet into the muddy bottom of the murky lake I wouldn’t love the simple feeling of standing on this shore of solid ground. I would never have known that achieving success is simple and all that I had to do was define success without listening to you.
The Secret of Success,
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My condolences on the passing of your friend. Five years ago I had my own awakening as to how skewed the traditional view of success is, when a friend of mine, JB, died, unexpectedly and tragically. He was a brilliant soul, genuinely caring and concerned for others, effortlessly and humbly intelligent. Although it seems bizarre to “trade” obituaries with a stranger over the internet, this post (not authored by me) essentially spells out what happened to him and the comments give some insight into who JB was. (http://liberalserving.typepad.com/liberalserving/2006/04/_on_april_1_200.html). His death was covered by local news and invoked controversial discussions, such that paparazzi appeared at, of all places, his funeral.
JB’s death shifted my world. At the time, I was essentially living out of my office on wall street and focused on work to the exclusion of all else. I did not learn of JB’s passing until the day before his funeral, notwithstanding the suffering of our mutual friends or the news coverage. Needless to say, when I finally received word that he had passed, I was deeply ashamed and immensely guilty for a multitude of reasons, the most prominent among them being that I had squandered my life in the most misguided, but perfectly, socially acceptable quest for success. After JB died, I reevaluated my life. My new mantra became “make as many people happy as you can today, and increase the goodness in the world” and my new goal became to substantially change one person’s life for the better. To that end, I relocated from New York to LA and became a lawyer. Now, the general public would probably dispute whether any lawyer can actually make anyone’s life better (and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that assessment, since lawyers deal in misery as a matter of course), but I am sure most people would agree that the legal industry fosters one of the most unbalanced, unhealthy, and unrealistic versions of success: long hours at a big name firm for a substantial paycheck. Despite the lasting impression that JB’s passing has had on my life, I am finding it hard to now come out from under that definition of “success,” mainly because my career path and achievements thus far have led others to believe I will be “that” kind of lawyer. It has placed me at a crossroads. I am thankful to have stumbled back across your blog, and this particular post, while this decision is hovering in the back of my mind. I feel as though your thoughts have brought me back to five years ago, back to the core of my initial reevaluation, at a time when I have needed it most. Thank you. 🙂
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Hey, it’s been quite a while since you posted. I thought I would say, that I was really surprised to see this body of work come out of one of the kids who seem to have everything it took to succeed in the CDS environment.
More and more, I see and hear from other fellow students who really suffered and struggled there in a way that has arrested our lives in one way or another. How completely bizarre that the only people trying to process the experience are the children, now adults who lived through it. It’s not as if the administration or teachers will ever take any responsibility for the climate there. And yet, somehow it’s all of it the parents, the teachers, the administration, the kids that make that place just toxic for many of us.
When I was little my mother told me all about her school and her friends. My children no nothing of CDS. There’s not much to say really. I regard my 50-some-odd classmates as cousins and follow what they are up, but that’s it. My parents can’t even discuss the place without having a huge argument.
Anyway, it’s interesting they haven’t done anything to change the culture up there.
Don’t abandon the blog. I noticed a goodly number of your commenters were alumnae.
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I’m so, very sorry about your friend. Loss is a hard thing to overcome.
This post hit me, hard, right in the heart. I can’t be sure if it was you’re writing or just the idea of success and how instilled it is in our minds at a very young age. Reading this I was thinking about it and realized how lucky I am to have a family that has always supported me, no matter what. After high school I told my parents that I wanted to go into Photography… Although my dad didn’t quite understand WHY I wanted to do that, he was sure there was no money to be made in that field, but I told him that it was that or I wasn’t going to school at all… I’m not entirely sure why I’m telling you this, I think it’s more for me… It’s strange, but you really hit a sore spot here and I mean that in the best way! You see, in my family I am the oldest of five, two of which have special needs, so growing up I viewed success very differently than a lot of people my age. At a very young age I realized that success had absolutely nothing to do with money, or material items, but more to do with your daily life. I was never able to really put it into words, but reading this I am now able to say that I believe success has more to do with little things in life. When you say:
Today, for me, success is:
One genuine smile evoked,
One sincere question asked,
One heartfelt compliment given,
One mutual hug,
One selfless act.
I genuinely believe that to be true. Success doesn’t come from having power, fame, or fortune, it comes from the simple ability to create your own life, a life that you are proud of, one worth smiling about. A life that is full of love and happiness, wisdom and curiosity. I can’t say that this is true for everybody, like you said some people thrive on living a materialistic life, and that makes me sad.. They just don’t know any better. So, after all that, I guess I just want to say thank you. This was a wonderful, thought provoking read and I’m so glad that I stumble upon it 🙂