Tag: Success

Go for Gold

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy1 Comment

“Someone once told me that I would never amount to anything. I showed them.”

I have heard that statement so often as people have shared their story about how they became a ‘success’ and what fueled them to get there. On the face of it, it appears that some of the greatest inventions, businesses, sporting feats have grown out of strong desire to ‘prove the haters wrong’.

I can’t help by think that maybe I’m doing my kids a dis-service by giving them encouragement and telling them that they can do hard things. Perhaps I should be telling them they will never be able to do it, and they won’t amount to anything, you know, to help fuel them on to greatness.

This idea of doing something in spite of the people who opposed you is more than just motivation. It is about contentment, happiness and joy. Is so called ‘greatness’ worth the sadness and depression that comes afterwards? Because once you achieve what you set out for, often there is a cliff that leads to the depths of despair. It is a common experience for Olympic athletes after they finish competing at the highest level.

The quote from Cool Runnings comes to mind, “A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”

You can use it for just about any other life situation:

  • A good marriage is a wonderful thing
  • Being a father is a wonderful thing
  • Owning a home is a wonderful thing
  • Getting a promotion is a wonderful thing
  • Landing that speaking gig is a wonderful thing
  • Writing a book is a wonderful thing
  • Earning more money is a wonderful thing
  • Winning that game is a wonderful thing
  • Winning that race is a wonderful thing
  • Being a leader is a wonderful thing
  • Having a large following is a wonderful thing

…but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.

What does it mean to be enough?

It’s contentment. It’s peace. It’s being able to sit in the stillness and quiet – to seek it out even, and to not need anything else.

If you can find that, then that is worth more than gold.

Will Ahmed on Success

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“Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.”

Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP, said this about a month before the birth of his first child. I wonder what may change over the next few months and years. Will has spent years working and building his company, I am sure with many long days and weeks working away.

Honestly, I think it’s too early in life for someone to claim they know what success looks like. He may be right, maybe success is being excited to go to work then being excited to come home. It sounds great, and I agree with it.

But I don’t know if that is the marker of success or not. In 20 years time when his first child has potentially left home will this philosophy hold up?

I can guarantee that if he wants to create a strong relationship with his son that is loving and supportive, then his time allocation between work and home will need to dramatically shift. By the time he is old enough to understand, his son won’t care about WHOOP. He won’t be impressed by Cristiano Ronaldo’s investment in the company. He’ll just see his dad with some dude who used to play soccer. Harsh but true. What does success look like then?

I think the only person who can claim to be successful is one who has lived the life and come to its end, looking back with gratitude recognising that they have lived it according to their values.

Success is less about the numbers and the profile and the opinions of others than it is about the family and culture you build around yourself…I’m pretty sure. I don’t fully know. I’m not there yet.

Vicarious Joy

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We are encouraged to live life ourselves, to experience things firsthand, to not live life as a spectator, watching others do wonderful things. Which I totally agree with…mostly.

One minor proviso, and it is around joy.

One of the best things we can do is to celebrate other people. Their successes. Their good fortune. Their hard work. Their awards. Their happiness. Their joy.

It may not come naturally, (it doesn’t to me), but it is something that we can work on over time to shift our thinking and spend time contemplating those in our lives. Think about each person that we love and be thankful for them, happy for them, joyful for them for all that is going right in their lives. You don’t even have to share it with them if you don’t want to.

Once you do that, think about those in your life that are neutral, neither love nor hate, and do the same thing.

Then, you guessed it, work your way towards thinking on those that you hate, those that have hurt you, those that have caused you some issues*, and contemplate thankfulness, happiness and joy.

If you can do that, it will literally change your brain and how you perceive the world.

*I’m not suggesting this as a tool to try if you have people who have genuinely caused you trauma, please see a professional.

Experience = Overconfidence

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Expertise is worth its weight in gold.

But overconfidence will kill you eventually.

Risky behaviour might pay off once or twice or even more, but eventually all of your chickens will come home to roost.

‘Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence.’ (Michael Lewis quoting Carter Mecher)

Or as Nassim Taleb puts it, when talking about the attribution bias, ‘You attribute your success to skills but your failures to randomness’.

Statistically, someone is bound to succeed through risk taking and luck, just as someone else is bound to fail miserably through taking the exact same risks and having bad luck.

We live in a wicked world with complex problems, and we behave as if we live in a kind world, with simple problems. Generally, it seems to work for us when things are stable, but stability is never guaranteed and there are occasions when everything gets disrupted. (They seem to be happening semi-often at the moment).

If you’re environment is telling you that you are great at something, and paying you handsomely to do that thing, you will begin to believe that you are great at it and deserve to be paid well for doing it. But what if you are not actually great at it? What if it is just a matter of luck that has landed you in a place that has made things fall in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you do everything works well for you…until it doesn’t?

The answer is humility. Recognising that you could be wrong about something. About anything. Entertaining that thought, even just for a moment is an act of generosity to you and those around you.

Lagging

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“All success is a lagging indicator” – Ryan Holiday

All good things come after the work.

If something good comes that you didn’t work for you usually waste it because you don’t fully understand how valuable it is.

So, the hard work that you are putting in right now, the discipline that no one else is seeing, the incremental progress which is almost invisible to anyone but you, that is the foundation of future success.

No one has ever won a gold medal without working for it over a long period of time. The medal is a lagging indication of how hard they have worked.

Success is a combination of that hard work, along with planning, reassessing, consistency and a whole lot of luck.

The cold hard reality is that success is never guaranteed, so you may as well find a way to enjoy the hard work that you are doing, because this could be the only reward you get from it.

Probably the most important part of this is to map out what success is for you. What are you aiming for? Is that really success? Start with that, and then do the other things. It will save you from faux success in the future, which is actually failure.

Success Will Follow

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Give first and success will follow.

Although, it depends on what your idea of success is. If success means ending up a stingy old person, making no positive impact on the world, then giving is most definitely not for you.

But, if your idea of success is having a loving family, being a generous person, sharing your life with those that you care about, having a life of growth and learning, then that will require something of you first.

I have become more aware over the years that a generous act is the catalyst for most of the good things in life. Some of those good things are guaranteed, like the positive emotional and psychological effects that generous acts have, and some of them are not guaranteed at all.

For example, there is no guarantee that if you are a generous person that you will have a happy, loving family life. But I can guarantee you definitely won’t have a happy, loving family life if you are not generous. It’s a risk to be generous and hope that good things come, but the consequences of not being generous are heavy.

The irony is that being generous solely for the sake of reaping the benefits takes something away from the generous act, but it doesn’t completely cancel it out. So, even if you can only muster a generous act because of what good it will bring you, keep doing that. Over time, being generous will change you and you will begin to seek the rewards less and less.

So, give first and then see what comes.

What are the chances?

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Out of every person that was born when I was born, what are the chances that I was born in Australia?

In the year I was born (which you can guess at), there were 124,287,658 other babies born in the world. In Australia there were 223,034 other babies born in that same year.

That means that I had a 1 in 557 chance of being born in Australia.

At the same time there were approximately 65,000,000 children born in Asia, most of which, at that time, were born into poverty. So, going on the numbers, in the year that I was born, there was approximately a 1 in 2 chance of being born in Asia, most likely into poverty. That doesn’t take into account the African continent at all. The numbers get pretty intense at that point.

Suffice to say, the chances of me being born into a country that wasn’t experiencing debilitating poverty were slim at best. But here I am, lucky I guess.

So, what’s the point?

The concept of the ‘self-made man’ or ‘self-made woman’ start to lose meaning for me at this juncture. I find it a little amusing when people start talking about how they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to get to where they are, or that it was only through their hard work and skill that they have succeeded in life.

More and more I strongly doubt those assertions. Hard work is definitely necessary in life, but looking at the odds laid out above (and this is just location of birth), I think it is more to do with luck than anything else. Where you were born, your gender, your race, your family of origin, all of these have a huge effect on your life before you even get the chance to start working hard.

How to ‘Success’

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Success.

What the heck is it? Is it winning? Being the first to do something? Achievement? Is someone else’s failure the cost of your success? Is it a destination? Does it disappear?

I’ve talked about it before, but it keeps coming back to me, Bob Dylan’s take on happiness and unhappiness being ‘yuppie’ words. Words for people who already have alot in life.

It’s the same with many definitions of success. I have heard people talk about the job, the car, the house, the boat, the influence that they want so that they would be considered a success. These are yuppie words. These are words used by people who are so entitled they don’t even realise where they are.

There is nothing wrong with striving for these things, but if they don’t come and you feel like a failure as a result, then you are drastically lost in life.

About 80% of people worldwide don’t own a car. Does that mean that 80% of people are not achieving success?

There are about 33 million recreational boats in the world. So, at best, 99.5% of people in the world don’t own a boat. Are they all not achieving success?

These measurements are so ‘first world’ that it is painful to watch.

The beauty of success is that each person gets to define it for themselves. No one can tell you what your life must look like to be successful. You get to create your own path and that path is much more than the things you accumulate on the way. It includes things like quality relationships, the positive impact you have on others, what you can create.

I think that any successful life starts with a sense of gratitude. A true understanding of what we already have. If I have a roof over my head, food on my table, a family who loves me and a job with purpose, then that seems pretty successful to me.

Get your hopes up!

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“Play it down, don’t get your hopes up. Don’t get too excited because if it ends up not happening, then you won’t feel let down and you haven’t lost anything.” Conventional Wisdom

But is that true? Are we missing something by not getting our hopes up? Are we not living the full experience of life if we don’t get excited about what could happen? What benefit could we bring if we spend some time imagining what could happen and allowing ourselves to feel what that could be like?

I like the idea of being an optimist. I want to be that. I want my kids to be that. To look at life through the lens of possibility rather than having a filter of restrictions and barriers.

I also like the idea of wisdom. It’s something that I strive for because wisdom is aligned with making good choices and living a good life.

Are they diametrically opposed? Can one be optimistic and wise at the same time?

Conventional wisdom is not generally optimistic. Conventional wisdom keeps us safe, protects us from being taken advantage of, from foolish decisions, from getting our hopes up only to see them dashed against the rocks.

But, if we can approach the world, always asking, what is possible, then anything can happen.

I have been to so many business networking events in my life. As an introvert, this has been a bit of an emotional minefield, and I often found myself deciding not to attend something that I had committed to, just before it was time to go to it. After a while of feeling like a bit of a failure, I made a conscious decision to go, no matter how I felt. This became an easy decision once I changed how I thought about success. For me, 90% of success is just turning up. If I go, then anything can happen, but if I don’t go, then nothing can happen. The other 10% is talking with two people at the event. More than that is fine, but if connect with two people and find out about them then that’s a win. I now go to networking events with asking the question, what is possible?

I want to be the type of person that gets their hopes up. I know that will lead to disappointment sometimes, but it could also lead to amazing things, that I could never dream of, like the world being a little bit more generous.

With, or without, her spoon, she is right

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My favourite part about watching my son run around the track at his athletics club is that it’s not important who crosses the finish line first. The focus is on getting the best out of yourself and going for a Personal Best (PB) time. I love seeing him run faster, throw, and jump further than he has ever run before. He is excited by that as well as he discovers that he is capable of so much more than he thought possible.

Sometimes he wins, sometimes he doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter, he is only competing against himself. The strength of that attitude is that it leaves space for more than one person to win in any race. It is not a zero-sum game, but it’s a place of growth, a place of development, a place of abundance.

We might think that type of attitude has no place outside of kids’ athletics, but it is truly how we can live our whole lives.

In a world where we live with the philosophy of “survival of the fittest” (which is a sham by the way), we are taking the easy way out. It’s easy when all you have to do is try and just be a little bit better than the other team, the other person, the other organisation, we do improve but only incrementally.

If we shifted our focus from trying to be a little bit better than someone else, and begin to imagine what we are capable of, then we realise that we can always get better compared to what we have done before and we are capable of so much more than we think is possible.

Mostly, just because someone else is doing well, it doesn’t mean that we lose out. There isn’t a limited amount of success in the world, there is an abundance meaning we can celebrate when other people are doing well and strive to get our own PB.

As Reese Witherspoon said, “Someone else’s success isn’t impeding mine”.