Don’t be a ‘success junkie', success is one long con trick.

Today we worship at the altar of meritocracy, we learn from an early age that through a combination of talent and hard work we can all end up occupying our rightful place in the world. If you have the right idea and work hard enough you too could be like Elon Musk or Sheryl Sandberg, lean in, just do it!

As humans, our basic desire to succeed is hardwired, along with our sociable nature, versatile intelligence and verbal communication skills. In evolutionary terms focusing on success likely gave our ancestors a better chance of getting enough food, greater social prestige, power and their choice of sexual partners.

However overtime our social reference points have changed, we are now influenced by those far from our immediate peer group via ‘the media’ and increasingly ‘social media. Where once definitions of success were perhaps more typical, excitingly there are now lots of lots of different definitions of success and our role models are incredibly diverse. In my house, there are the Pro Gamers avidly followed by my boys, the perfect Instagram families that are my wife’s guilty pleasure and the pro-cyclists that I have idolised since I was a young boy. 

Even with all this diversity, success is still relatively improbable, it is the hard-to-attain nature of success that makes it so alluring, and which connects its many forms. However, our everyday exposure to successful people creates a sense of dysphoria in our modern lives. This dysphoria can make us second guess ourselves, as we become so used to seeing the improbable it begins to feel like it should all be achievable.

It’s a bit like when you are in the supermarket, or on the motorway, or in an airport (remember those) it can feel like you always pick the slowest queue. In reality, you are not a bad queue picker, it’s just you can only be in one queue, but you can see many, so it’s likely at least one of the other queues will be faster than yours. Now think of being on social media as looking at hundreds of the fastest queues in the world at once, it’s no wonder it leaves people feeling like they’ve picked the wrong life and are being left behind.

Success works like this, the guys (they are mostly guys) at the top make all the money and everyone works like crazy to be like them, thus making them even more money… 

Success is top-heavy; I observed long ago that career development was not really about your career, but about how well you conform to the expectations of your managers. I could see people in the most senior positions made the real money, and that I and my peers at junior levels were required to work very hard for a fraction of what we were charged out for. If you were different (like me with ADHD) and you didn’t fit through the square holes you needed to pass through, your hard work or talent weren’t going to pay off to the same extent as people who fitted the mould. 

In short, most companies disproportionately reward those who are most successful. Economists Edward Lazear and Sherwin Rosen have called this Idea Tournament Theory. In Tournament Theory executives at the top are paid very highly, in order that more junior employees put the hard yards to reach the top, the trouble is a lot of people put in the hard yards but very few reach the top. Most work very hard simply on the promise, not realising they are unlikely to succeed, at the point they do realise it’s too late and there are younger hungrier people ready to replace them. This dynamic is perfectly captured by the McKinsey maxim ‘up or out’, the system only works if those at the bottom crave the future possibility of massive success more than a fair share today.

Our society is beset with problems caused by inequality of opportunity, yet we continue to worship at the altar of success and of the successful.

Success creates unfairness, you know how your parents told you life wasn’t fair, it turns out they were right. Many aspects of life in a modern capitalist economy are driven by competition, but as we are discovering it’s not a competition based on a level playing field. Most of what will or won’t make you successful are unfortunately out of your control. Who your parents are (genetically and non-genetically), where you live, your social class, family wealth, where you go to school, your ethnicity, your gender, all of these factors make a difference to your chances of success and can be proven to do so.

Yes but if you try hard enough you can make it, well numerically this argument just doesn’t stack up. The evidence doesn’t point at women or discriminated minorities trying less hard, but financially they are disadvantaged. I read an excellent article this week on research who’s findings indicated that career advice specifically aimed at helping women to be more assertive and successful (AKA leaning in) can impede their progress. This was explained by the effect that such advice encourages people in the workplace to think inequality it’s a problem that can be solved by individual action (AKA striving for success), rather than requiring us to address inequalities directly. If our societal contract is founded on the idea that success is equally available to all, and it turns out not to be, then why should people be so accepting that the successful rightfully deserve all the spoils.

Advice on success is like a cure for baldness, a lot of people will tell you they can give it to you, almost none of it will work.

Success breeds false prophets; I think this is because people want success so much they are prepared to ignore reality for a chance of achieving it. Tony Robbins is the doyen of the success industry, he has a net worth of over 600 million dollars, address crowds of tens of thousands, offering to help them ‘Unleash the Power Within’. However, in common with a lot of others who profess to help you make a success of your life, there is little to no evidence his approach actually works. I’ll qualify, there is a lot of evidence that the approach works to make him very rich, but his followers not so much.

Perhaps there’s an issue with how we interpret the keys to success? The Halo effect first identified by US psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, describes the tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. It goes like this; if a person or company is successful people give it adulation and infer everything it does contribute to its success, they want to copy it, assuming the same things will work elsewhere. When people encounter an unsuccessful person or company the assumptions are the inverse. You often find people slavishly quoting the routines of famous people ‘Elon Musk Reads a book a day' as if these routines have magical powers! It’s a bit like a twenty-first-century version of using holy relics, ‘I keep Tiger Wood’s big toe with me at all times, so I can be a Tiger in my life too’.

I honestly believe that the best thing we can do is flip the bird at success. I’m serious, throw all accumulated success fetishising bullshit out of the window!

So tell success to go jump, I’m down with Timothy O'Leary on this one ‘Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out. And here’s the real kicker being successful won’t make you any happier, other than temporarily, in fact, lots of things that accompany success such as competitiveness, stress, long hours are the opposite of what makes you well and sane. I’ve seen multiple successful friends crash and burnout in high-pressure consultancy or banking jobs, I’ve had my own burn out from working excessively long hours just because I was scared of ‘failing’. This lead me to a bit of an epiphany if chasing being successful makes me and others unwell then what is the point?

Success can be about experiencing your life. There’s a book that was written on things that people regret on their death beds. Turns out very few people at the point of dying really care very much about how successful they have been. The main regret people had was in not living a life that was true to themselves and number two was to wish they had not worked so hard. Taking the time to appreciate the life you have for me is a success, it’s not going to put me on the cover of Forbes but at the end of the day, I’ll leave you with another book I love ‘the subtle art of not giving a fuck’.