How do you know if your life is successful or not? And what allows you to judge this — salary, position, title, recognition of the community? Positive psychologist Emily Isfahani Smith explains why it is dangerous to associate success with career and social prestige.
Some misconceptions about what success is are rampant in today’s society. Someone who went to Harvard is undoubtedly smarter and better than someone who graduated from Ohio State University. A father who stays at home with children is not as useful to society as a person who works in one of the world’s largest companies. A woman with 200 followers on Instagram (an extremist organization banned in Russia) is less significant than a woman with two million.
This notion of success is not only misleading, it is very damaging to those who believe in it. While working on the book The Power of Meaning, I spoke with many people who build their identity on the basis of their education and career achievements.
When they succeed, they feel that they do not live in vain — and are happy. But when they do not get the results they expected, they quickly fall into despair, convinced of their own worthlessness. In fact, being successful and prosperous does not mean having a successful career or having a lot of expensive knick-knacks. It means to be a good, wise and generous person.
The development of these qualities brings people a sense of satisfaction. Which, in turn, helps them to face difficulties courageously and calmly accept death. Here are the criteria we should use to measure success—ours, others, and especially our children.
Rethinking Success
According to the theory of the great XNUMXth-century psychologist Eric Erickson, each of us, in order to live a meaningful life, needs to solve certain problems at each stage of development. In adolescence, for example, such a task becomes the formation of identity, a sense of identity with oneself. The main goal of adolescence is to establish intimate bonds with others.
In maturity, the most important task becomes «generativity», that is, the desire to leave a mark after oneself, to make a significant contribution to this world, whether it is educating a new generation or helping other people realize their potential.
Explaining the term «generativity» in the book Life Cycle Complete, Eric Erikson tells the following story. Numerous relatives came to visit the dying old man. He lay with his eyes closed, and his wife whispered to him all who came to greet him. “And who,” he suddenly asked, sitting up abruptly, “who is looking after the store?” This phrase expresses the very meaning of adult life, which the Hindus call «keeping the peace.»
In other words, a successful adult is one who outgrows the natural youthful selfishness and understands that it is no longer a matter of going your own way, but of helping others, creating something new and useful for the world. Such a person perceives himself as part of a large canvas of life and seeks to preserve it for future generations. This mission gives meaning to his life.
A person feels well when he knows that he plays an important role in his community.
Entrepreneur and investor Anthony Tian is an example of a generative person. But he wasn’t always. In 2000, Tian, a freshman from Harvard Business School, ran a fast-growing $100 million Internet services company called Zefer. Tian was going to take the company to the open market, which was supposed to bring him windfall profits.
But on the very day the company was scheduled to go public, the Nasdaq experienced its biggest crash in history. The dot-com bubble, which was formed as a result of the rise in the shares of Internet companies, burst. This led to the restructuring of Tian’s company and three rounds of layoffs. The businessman was ruined. He felt humiliated and demoralized.
After recovering from defeat, Tian realized that his understanding of success was leading him down the wrong path. The word «success» was for him synonymous with victory. He writes: «We saw our success in the millions that the public offering of shares was supposed to bring, and not in the innovations we created, not in their impact on the world.» He decided that it was time to use his abilities to achieve high goals.
Today, Tian is a partner at investment firm Cue Ball, where he tries to live up to his newfound understanding of success. And he seems to be very successful at it. One of his favorite projects is MiniLuxe, a chain of nail salons he founded to raise the profile of this underpaid profession.
In his network, manicure masters earn well and receive pension payments, and excellent results are guaranteed to clients. “I don’t want my kids to think of success in terms of lose-win,” Tian says. “I want them to strive for wholeness.”
Do Something Helpful
In the Ericksonian model of development, the quality opposite to generativity is stagnation, stagnation. Associated with it is a sense of the meaninglessness of life and one’s own uselessness.
A person feels prosperous when he knows that he plays some important role in his community and is personally interested in its prosperity. This fact was noticed back in the 70s by developmental psychologists during a ten-year observation of 40 men.
One of their subjects, a writer, was going through a difficult period in his career. But when he received a call with an offer to teach creative writing at the university, he took it as a confirmation of his professional suitability and significance.
Another participant, who had been unemployed for more than a year at the time, told the researchers: “I see a blank wall in front of me. I feel like no one cares about me. The thought that I can’t provide for my family’s needs makes me feel like a complete jerk, a moron.»
The chance to be useful gave the first man a new purpose in life. The second did not see such an opportunity for himself, and this was a big blow for him. Indeed, unemployment is not just an economic problem. This is an existential challenge too.
Research shows that spikes in the unemployment rate coincide with rising suicide rates. When people feel that they are not capable of doing something worthwhile, they lose ground under their feet.
Apparently, deep down in my soul, something was missing, since constant approval from the outside was required.
But work is not the only way to be useful to others. John Barnes, another participant in the long-term study, learned this from experience. Barnes, a professor of biology at the university, was a very ambitious and quite successful specialist. He received such significant grants as a Guggenheim Fellowship, was unanimously elected chairman of the local chapter of the Ivy League, and was also the associate dean of the medical school.
And for all that, he, a man in his prime, considered himself a failure. He had no goals that he would consider worthy. And what he liked most was “working in the laboratory and feeling like a member of the team” — no one else, in his words, “didn’t need a damn thing.”
He felt that he was living by inertia. All the years he was driven only by the desire for prestige. And above all, he wanted to gain a reputation as a first-class scientist. But now he realized that his desire for recognition meant his spiritual emptiness. “Apparently, deep down in my soul, something was missing, since constant approval from the outside was required,” explains John Barnes.
For a middle-aged person, this state of uncertainty, fluctuating between generativity and stagnation, between caring for others and caring for oneself, is quite natural. And the resolution of these contradictions, according to Erickson, is a sign of successful development at this age stage. Which, after all, Barnes did.
Most of us have dreams that don’t come true. The question is how do we respond to this disappointment?
When the researchers visited him a few years later, they found that he was no longer as focused on personal progress and the recognition of others. Instead, he found ways to be of service to others—becoming more involved in raising his son, handling administrative tasks at the university, supervising graduate students in his lab.
Perhaps his scientific work will never be recognized as significant, he will never be called a luminary in his field. But he rewrote his story and acknowledged that there was success. He stopped chasing prestige. Now his time is occupied by the things his colleagues and family members need.
We are all a bit like John Barnes. Maybe we are not so hungry for recognition and not so far advanced in our careers. But most of us have dreams that don’t come true. The question is how do we respond to this disappointment?
We can conclude that we are failures and that our lives have no meaning, as Barnes initially decided. But we can choose a different definition of success, one that is generative—working quietly to maintain our little stores around the world and trusting that someone will take care of them after we’re gone. Which, ultimately, can be considered the key to a meaningful life.