Rethinking Success and Significance

An overheard conversation in Los Angeles:

Woman: “I have to find a new accountant”

Man: “What happened to Craig?”

Woman: “He ‘found himself’ on a retreat in Malibu and decided to start an animal sanctuary in Ecuador.”

Another 4.25 million workers quit their jobs in January as the Great Resignation continues (see table below). The data suggests more workers seem to be reacting to the same lostness Craig was feeling.

During my own journey through what I have termed as the Great Exhaustion, and coupled with the conversations I have with others, I have concluded many of us are rethinking what one’s work-life identity truly means. While an existential questioning of one’s work or life purpose is not a new phenomenon, I do believe the pandemic-induced upheaval of the past two years has gaslit a wide-ranging rethinking of our work-life relationship from those in the C-suite to the accountant on a Malibu retreat. As I have settled into my own post-corporate state of liminality, I have wondered how Craig is doing after he “found himself” (I do not know him but he is a real person). Additionally, I have been thinking about what finding oneself means in relation to one’s work-life identity and what to do about it other than move to Ecuador.

During my contemplation, I have thought about Bob Buford’s 1995 book, “Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance”. Buford’s thesis was that chasing success becomes, as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “like sea-water, the more we drink, the thirstier we become”. Buford concluded one should move beyond chasing success to create second life based on significance, which he defined as “a life of really mattering”. While I agree with his premise, I think Buford’s view of the success-significance relationship seems to be as dated as an AOL.com email account. He seems to suggest a mutual exclusivity between success and significance. That is, after spending years chasing success, accumulating resources, and then in the second act of one’s life engaging in a meaningful life. I believe this continued trend in the quits data has many of us rethinking, why wait? Is there a more 2022 view of success and significance? One that does not require someone to wait until retirement to experience. As my mentor, Dr. Bruce Larson once wrote, “The emotionally healthy person lives in the now”.

Rethinking success and significance. For many of us, chasing success in the pandemic work environment of the past two years has become an all-gas-no-brakes speedway. If sustained for too long, that kind of daily churn crowds out the opportunity for one to experience a meaningful life outside an always-on environment. For myself, I did not realize how much of a toll this all-gas-no-brakes situation was taking until I departed my corporate job on January 31. Twenty-eight hours after my last work-related Zoom call, I was walking somewhere in Disneyland when I received a notification on my phone advising me that I had been officially disconnected from my work email. On the one hand, I was immediately relieved, but it was sometime later that I realized just how quiet my days and nights were minus the constant stream of email notifications flowing across my phone screen. Much like the urbanized din of traffic, Metro buses, bar revelers, and LA police sirens I constantly hear outside my window, I had become so accustomed to the relentless email traffic that I did not appreciate how truly loud it was until it was silenced.

In this newfound stillness, I have been contemplating the relationships of work-life and success-significance. One question I have pondered is, are success and significance mutually exclusive, or is it possible to somehow effectively combine the two?

You may recall from elementary school science how oil and water, although both liquids, do not naturally combine with one another due to the polarity of their molecules. These non-combinable types of liquids are called immiscible. However, with the introduction of an emulsifier, two immiscible liquids can coexist in a new form. You may not recall any of this from your science class, but if you have ever enjoyed mayonnaise on your sandwich or had Julia Child’s hollandaise sauce on your poached eggs then you have experienced first-hand the value added by an emulsifier.?

So I propose this concept: Rethink the immiscible concepts of chasing success and embracing significance as two areas of our lives in need of an emulsifier.

Then, what are some “emulsifiers” those of us in the Great Exhaustion can utilize to better mix our work-life immiscibility? I am sure there are many, but here are a few I have personally embraced.

EMBRACE your raison d’être. Recently, I was in a Starbucks when two women passed by my table and I overheard one say to the other, “I just don’t know what I want, you know?”. Given they both had drinks in hand, I deduced this particular conundrum was about?a strategic life question versus the drink menu. After hearing her, I thought of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who was in a similar quandary when he spoke the most famous chiasmus ever in the English language:

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer,

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles?

Opening lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

This sense of lostness is very real for any of us who wrestle with the question regarding our purpose or our raison d’être, which literally translates from French as “reason to be”. This is a big life question, which I believe the Great Exhaustion has reignited in many people. While each of our personal desire to be will vary, I have learned one thing in my own experience so far: Whatever your raison d’être happens to be, embrace it, do not just dream about it. Is discovering it weird and awkward? Absolutely. Whether it is you, I, Hamlet, the woman at Starbucks, or Craig the accountant, the choices surrounding how to manage our work-life portfolio can be very disconcerting.

Think for a moment about what comes to mind when you see a swan in your mind’s eye. Most likely you think of beauty, peace, or a graceful movement along a serene body of water. Now, stop and think: Have you ever seen a swan walk? Watch this video from YouTube.?

For all its beauty on the lake, a swan walking to the lake is the damnedest thing. Their walk is a laborious, almost drunken-like waddle that is anything but graceful.

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, compared the swan’s walk to our life struggles in?his poem, “Der Schwan” (“The Swan”). Here is a portion of it:

This clumsy living that moves lumbering,

as is in ropes through what is not done,

reminds of us the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is letting go?of the ground

we stand and cling to everyday is like the swan,

when he nervously lets himself down

Into the water, which receives him gaily.

and which flows joyfully under

and after him, wave after wave.

Translation by Robert Bly

Rilke’s lesson for us is, just like the swan, when we are out of our true element, the journey through the liminal space searching for and embracing our raison d’être, we too will appear awkward. Author David Whyte points out in the original German version, Rilke uses the word ungeschaffnen, which Bly translates as “awkward” yet literally means “uncreated”. This is the essence of the uncomfortableness: We must create our own walk to the numinous edge of the pond where we belong, and once we arrive, then and only then, like the swan, we can be transformed into what we desire to be. As Rilke describes, when the swan reaches the water, its awkwardness falls away and it gracefully swims in the beauty of its true element. The water enables the swan to fulfill its beauty, not walking on land. So too, if we confront and act upon that numinous frontier of the chiasmus “To be, or not to be” to embrace our raison d’être, only then will we begin to?feel less exhausted.?

EMBRACE SATISFICING. Modern financial theory has empirically demonstrated how investors can create efficient investment portfolios using a diversified mix of assets. Borrowing from financial theory, I propose reframing the chasing-embracing concept as a portfolio in which we invest our most precious asset, time. Instead of a frontier of risk and return, the frontier I posit is satisficing. No, that is not a typo. The term satisficing is an amalgam of the words satisfaction and sacrifice, coined by Nobel Laureate Herb Simon. He argued the rational decisions attributed to humans by economists were not really purely rational, but rather a personal mix of satisfaction and sacrifice. To illustrate, some people are very happy to sit in the middle seat on the back row of an airplane in exchange for a cheap fare. They sacrifice comfort for the satisfaction of a budget-friendly price. Other people will gladly sacrifice money in exchange for the comfort of a premium seat, near the front of the plane. Within a given flight, there is a mix of people in terrible seats but happy with the price, and others comfortable in a roomy seat who see the money spent for the extra legroom as a worthy investment.

Satisficing applies not just to airline ticket purchases but to our work-life choices as well. I argue we must rethink the investment of our precious asset, time, into both chasing success and embracing investing in our significance. My friend, the theologian, Dr. Bruce Larson, was asked many times, “Bruce, what is the meaning of life?”. To which he would reply, “Some people find a parking space, some people never find a parking space.” What did he mean? He meant satisficing. Some people look diligently for the perfect parking spot. Others, park, walk, and go on about their day. But in the end, you must make a choice about what is important to you. This trade-off is our work-life choices will not always be clear or perfect. We must make choices, draw boundaries, and act along the satisficing frontier to grow both success and significance portfolios as diligently as we nurture our financial portfolios.

EMBRACE THE TRUTH ABOUT SUCCESS. Stein’s Law says, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The corollary is this: The fluid intelligence we all use to achieve success will one day diminish. Your earning power, your potential job opportunities, and your achievements will all diminish at some point. Are you reading this on your Blackberry? Did you shop at Sears this past weekend? I never guess, but I can say the probabilities are solidly against a 'yes' answer to either of those questions. Just like Blackberry and Sears, all organisms and strategies are governed by a non-negotiable life cycle of growth, benefit, maturity, and harvest. Business school case studies and therapist’s offices are filled with those who have been unpleasantly surprised by the realization their decline is inevitable. There is really no way around it. However, there is some good news. Decline is a certainty, irrelevance is not mandatory.?

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks was inspired to write his book “From Strength to Strength” while flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. He was seated in front of a man whom he overheard during the flight who was continuously lamenting to his wife how he wished he was dead. The man said life no longer held anything for him. His best days were behind him. “If only the Lord would take me,” he repeated. After landing, the cabin lights illuminated and to Brook’s surprise this downtrodden soul, so eager for death to end his miserable life, was greeted by many passengers as he filed out of the aircraft. The man was a well-known hero. His contributions to the world had been significant. Even the pilots exited the cockpit to shake hands with him as he departed to share their admiration for his accomplishments. “You have been my idol since childhood,” one of them remarked to the man.

This incident left such an impression on Brooks that it sparked his most recent research into what he describes as the “striver’s curse”. Strivers are people who only know how to chase achievement-based success only to find their inevitable decline absolutely terrifying. They realize too late that misallocating their work-life portfolio leaves their raison d’être seriously underfunded. When chasing your success is no longer able to pay off in achievements for you, then just like the hero on the flight from Los Angeles, misery becomes your most unwelcome companion.?

Fleur Adcock, a New Zealand-born poet, while in the midst of her own mid-life rethinking, took a year-long sabbatical amidst the hills and lakes of Northern England. As her sabbatical concluded, she composed the poem “Weathering”. Here are a few poignant lines describing the embracing of her raison d’être:

But now that I am in love with a place

which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look.

Embrace the rebalance of your individual work-life portfolio. Invest your most precious asset, time, into your passions, your family, the great unknown. Do not become like the man on the plane who invested solely?in achievement. Rather, live out my friend Dr. Bruce Larson’s wise meaning of life prescription: “We have an opportunity to face life in a whole new way. Start by living life to the hilt. Have no unfinished business in your life….If there is some adventure you want to begin…start today.”?

This is the path out of the Great Exhaustion.?

References:

Adcock, Fleur (2000). "Poems: 1960 - 2000"

Brooks, Arthur (2022). "From Strength to Strength"

Buford, Bob (1995). "Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance"

Larson, Bruce (1990). "Living Beyond Our Fears: Discovering Life When You're Scared to Death"?

Nepo, Mark (2020). "The Book of Awakening"

Rilke, Rainer Maria (1907). "New Poems"

Whyte, David (2001). "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity"

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/