I wanted to talk to you about a thing. About success. Weird, no?!
I talk to a lot of people. I meet a lot of people. And some people seem to view me as ‘a success’. Who knew?!
Okay. If I’m being honest and non-girly, I will say that I kind of knew some people thought that, but that I am uncomfortable with the idea.
I’m not comfy with the conventional idea of success, really. I’ve seen that idea in magazines, on telly. I’ve heard it talked about a lot too. I’m not sure it’s what I’m after.
That view of success seems to be: something about being in a magazine, something about getting a good deal, something about followers/fans/fame, something about free stuff, something about being on telly eee-tee-cee. There are other somethings, too. Somethings I have no experience of, but that apparently define success (to some): fancy trips, fat cars, thin thighs, perfect hair, home beautifuls… Also STUFF. It’s a sign of success? Or something. Those are not MY views. Those are not my kind of successes.
I think success is a very personal, difficult-to-see thing.
People often ask me about my ‘success’. About how I ‘do it all’. My answer to them is two-fold: a) freaking awesome and positive time management and b) bugger things up quite often. These two super powers combine resulting in the facade that is ‘doing it all’ and the eye-catchingly amazing (yet easily removed) Cape of Success.
Of course I can’t do it all. I don’t do it all. I bugger stuff up. Very often I leave my Cape of Success in the washing machine for three days until it smells like pond.
I think success can be a gratifying, yet fleeting state. And I think we must define our own success.
It’s not just me. Today, as I walked into the city to meet my friend, I listened to a podcast by Alain de Botton. It seems he has a personalised view of success too. It’s possible he has a pondy cape, even…
Here’s what he said (and listen to the full podcast here)
Here’s an insight that I’ve had about success. You can’t be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can’t have it all. You can’t. So any vision of success has to admit what it’s losing out on, where the element of loss is. I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we are not succeeding.
Thing about a successful life is, a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They are sucked in from other people: chiefly, if you’re a man, your father, and if you’re a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one is quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe that that’s true.
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we’re told that banking is a very respectable profession a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas. and make sure that we own them, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough, not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of a journey, that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
So I’m going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is by all means, success, yes.But let’s accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let’s probe away at our notions of success. Let’s make sure our ideas of success are truly our own. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Alain.
I DO have my own notions of successes. For me success is in small gains. Books read. Things learned. Challenges overcome. Feelings understood. Skills acquired. Fears faced. Dots joined. Success is the happiness of the people around me. Really nice dinners. Exercise routines. Hot jaffles. Non-pondy washing. Success for me is about how I feel on the inside. It’s not about how I appear, to the outside. And sometimes it smells like pond.
How about you? Do you measure your success against the work or path of another? Are you flowing along in the direction convention seems to take you? Perhaps life seems to get in the way, and the already trodden path seems like the safest, fastest or no-brainiest option. Or maybe it’s not. Or are you doing it your own way?
How do you define success? What makes you feel successful? Little wins? Big things? A bit of both? Do tell me? Do you have your own notions of success?
Do you ever wear a cape?
x Pip
(Brackety PS: The jaffle is creamed corn, gruyere and eggplant pickle from the must-visit Fitzroy Grub Food Van)