Meaningless Success–Why Succeeding is Easier When There’s Nothing on It

I work with overachievers who set very high standards for themselves. And one thing we look at lot together is determining what is actually real about those standards, and what they are making up in their heads.

Success is one of those things we make up.

Success can feel incredibly important, even vital. I know many people whose entire career (and identity) is based on being “successful,” and yet it success is completely imaginary.

Paradoxically, our very ideas about success can get in the way of us achieving it, however we define it. Here are three ways we get in the way of success, and how we can let go of those ways to experience a different kind of success.

Three Things We Make up About Success That Only Get in the Way

I see three main things that most people think look real about success. Yet when we look at them closely, we can see very quickly that they are one hundred percent made up.

Success Itself is Solid and Real

First, people treat success as real and solid, when it is only made of thought.

Everyone wants success. Yet you cannot even talk about success, let alone have it, without thinking of something and calling it success. And everyone thinks of it differently. This is invisible to most people. But as one of my coaches likes to say, you can’t put success in a wheelbarrow. There is nothing that you can point at in the outside world and get uniform agreement that it is success.

To one person, success could be taking a company public. To another, an SVP job. To a third, living quietly on a secluded lake with no job at all. Sometimes it’s related to a specific amount of money. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with money.

One thing I see over and over again is people defining success and then punishing themselves for not having it yet. For not being “there” yet. Without recognizing that, outside their own heads, there is no there. That there, a destination, is just another concept they have made up and then treated as solid.

As one of my clients struggled with, “When will it be enough? When will I feel like I’m there?” He was making up that there was a place you could actually go, and then frustrating himself with the fact that he wasn’t there yet!

But like success, “there” is something we make up. And then we it looks like we are “there,” with the new promotion or some other discrete achievement, we move the there, because we can tell when we get there that it’s really not the there we were talking about! (Otherwise, we’d feel better, right?)

There is ultimately no journey and no destination, but we make them up as hyperrealistic illusions, over and over, in a kind of ultimate virtual reality machine that we call our life.

Success Means Something

Most people take the idea of success, of arriving “there,” as something that means something really important about them.

That they have “made it.” That they are finally “somebody.”

Again, made up.

And so tempting. So many of the stories, whether they be ads for sports cars or even books about the hero’s journey, are about being special through having arrived.

I once amused myself by walking around a high end shopping mall looking at all the ads that were trying to convince me that they only thing that I needed to be successful was a particular brand of a particular kind of luxury good.

An automobile. A watch. A handbag. Beautful things, no doubt, but also apparently imbued with the mystical ability to make me feel whole and happy with myself.

I’ve fallen for that one before. And it does work. For anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. But like a drug, you need bigger and bigger doses, and each of them is ultimately unsatisfying.

Whether it’s an IPO, a promotion, or a nice new car, that symbol of success only feels good for a little bit. And then the nagging suspicion returns that I am still a fraud, that I will never be enough.

Not Having Success Means Something, Too

The flipside of success is failure. The idea that if we do not get success, it means something, too.

That we are a “loser.” A “failure.” That we will never be enough. That our parents or teachers or siblings were right.?

Who was I to think I could do that?

I should have known.

I’m not special after all. I’m just like all the other losers.

Many of my clients face this. I have, too. My coach, the late Doug Silsbee, once said, “If you don’t think you have imposter syndrome, you aren’t paying attention.”

For years I missed that the “failure” story was one that others had told me and that I had innocently believed, and over time, embellished. That I was creating and experiencing that story and then feeling bad about it. I was not a failure because I could not be. Just like success, failure is made up, too.

What This All Points To–And How to Have Less Riding on Success

Turns out we make up most everything. Every experience we have is 100 percent internally generated, just a representation made by our brain that we call the world, and the stories we make up about that representation. When I saw this, things began to shift for me.

The voices in my head quieted a bit. I took the world less seriously, because it was constantly changing based on my thinking (which was also constantly changing). I enjoyed myself more.

And I got more done, because it became more clear what was actually important to me, versus things I was doing for other people or things I thought I “should” do. It was easier to have the kind of impact I wanted to have.

As I explored this understanding more, it became apparent that even the most solid looking thing in the world, our own sense of a personal identity, is just a bunch of made up stories.

Like success, it looks like our identities are real. It looks like they can help us be good at some things, and get in the way of us being good at others.

It looks like if we push, if we are hard on ourselves, if we focus ruthlessly on “personal development,” we can achieve a breakthrough.

It fascinates me how much our society has trained us that the harder we push, the faster success will come.

That if we push through the crucible, if we handle the pressure cooker, somehow, that is what leads to success.

But all of those things are made up. There is no crucible. Pressure is completely self-inflicted, and my experience and that of my clients seems to show pressure doesn’t help us do our our best work. It gets in the way.

I’m not saying that you can do nothing and win the game of success. Even though we experience the world internally, there does seem to be a world out there and you and you do seem to need to do things to create in that world.

But I am saying that it is a lot easier to do a lot if you have nothing on that doing. If you are just doing, without your very sense of identity riding on the result, you also end up spending a lot more time doing and a lot less time ruminating about it.

The easiest way that I know to do that is to see that everything we are after, whether success or another destination, is something we have made up in our head.

That the joy is only in the doing, in the creating, because that’s the only place it can be.

The joy is in whatever is emerging for you, right now. Now is the only thing you’re not making up.

And to me, that joy is the ultimate success.

What about for you?

#leadership #personaldeveloment #innatewisdom #insight #ceo