Success Reconfigured

by Liz Dadanian

Chihuly Glass and Garden Exhibit in Seattle

The fact that humans are hard-wired for survival has an important tie-in to our modern desires for success and achievement. Ten thousand years ago, managing to stay alive equated to success. Today, achieving new skills, gaining status and attaining the things we desire is what improves our chances for meaningful existence on this earth for as long as we can prolong it. Most of us innately understand the connection between success and our own psychological wellness. Learning, failing and re-learning are important catalysts in defining our sense of self and personal identity. For many of us, the pursuit and attainment of success is the only path toward self-actualization.

Success also has a dark side. Our deeply rooted human instincts have unintended consequences. The modern experience of success has become so enmeshed with cultural notions of fame, recognition and money that our own personal desires often become unrecognizable. We revere the famous, exhaust ourselves chasing status symbols and willingly contort our needs to align with the mainstream. The greatest irony is that all our effort and achievement isn’t making us any happier. The latest World Happiness Report indicates that we’ve managed to increase our incomes by three times per person since the 60s, while our levels of self-reported happiness are actually on the decline. It seems to me that real success ought to be served up with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Where did it all go wrong?

Mindset has a lot to do with it. Our attitudes shape how we approach things and dictate how we feel about our circumstances. Unfortunately, many of our mainstream views pertaining to success are toxic and limiting. If you’re looking for deeper fulfillment, it is probably worth examining some common success traps.

Trap #1: Expecting success to be linear

The most common success trap is the tendency to believe that achievement is arrived at by following a linear path. Everyone has some version of a success timeline. Many of them go something like, get educated, pick a career path, meet someone, get promoted, live together, get married, get promoted again, have kids or a pet, buy a house, fight for another promotion, and so on and so on.  There isn’t anything inherently wrong with following a narrow, defined path. You will likely get “there” fairly quickly and may even go very far up the ladder.

The bigger question is, “what did you miss out on by going straight up?” We don’t value taking time to meander a bit and that’s a shame. Growth comes from following your curiosity. I think we owe it to ourselves to be interested and be interesting. Almost everything that is linear will soon be handled by technology anyway. It is a better investment to spend time thinking about all the fabulous ways that you can create cool moments of fusion between your skills and interests that aren’t connected in an obvious way. Adopting this mindset tends to set the stage for the kind of ingenuity that may end up springboarding you into an arena of success you didn’t even know existed.

Trap #2 – Allowing your success to be externally defined

You run a high risk of losing your true north when you expend all your energy comparing your wins and losses to those of everyone around you. Warning signs should be popping up when you notice that you’re starting to pay special attention to what everyone else is pursuing.  Alarm bells should be going off in your head any time you pursue a path just primarily motivated by keeping up with everyone else. Before you go running in a direction, slow down just enough to ask yourself some very important questions…Do you want what you’re about to go after? Like, do you really want it? Or are you about to spend a whole bunch of time and effort pursing something that is only valuable to your cohort? Are you staying on a path you no longer love just because you once really desired it? Failing to ask and then answer these questions for yourself is a surefire recipe for becoming someone you never intended to be.

Develop a deep relationship with yourself and refuse to lock yourself into an externalized loop of success. Stop trying to buy it, lease it, rent it, marry it, date it and please your parents with it. When you figure out that success is an inside job, you get to take your power back. You’ll know when you’re successful because you defined the criteria. The added benefit of this mindset is that you’re much harder to knock off balance when the going gets tough, because you’re on a personal mission, fueled by desire.

Trap #3: Approaching success as a zero-sum game

One of the biggest success traps is getting suckered into believing that our human experience is a zero-sum game. Zero-sum is an economic theory that measures each participant's gain or loss of utility as being exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participants. In simpler terms, you win, I lose. You get, I don’t. Once you start seeing the world through this lens, you quickly lose sight of the benefits of collaboration, teamwork, kindness, and compassion. You stop taking worthwhile risks for fear of failure. You start hoarding resources and information while behaving in ways that damage trust and build walls between you and other people. Zero-sum thinking is reactionary and short term, turning every transaction into a binary problem.

Real success takes a longer-term view and considers many more possible answers to life’s intriguing scenarios. There are realms where we all win and some where we all lose. Sometimes a loss right now leads to greater insight for the future. Widening the lens allows you to see that acts of friendship and goodwill build trust networks capable of amplifying success beyond our wildest dreams.

On a recent trip through the pacific northwest, I stumbled upon the work of Dale Chihuly. Chihuly is a world-recognized artist who creates massive and breathtaking installments of blown glass. His worked is revered, loved, and it has also made him very financially successful. His path reminds us of what can happen when we refuse to fall into success traps.

Meander a bit – Chihuly enrolled in, dropped out of and eventually graduated from multiple university art programs. He followed his interests to the Middle East and Europe where he refined his skill and met mentors who shaped his future work.

Listen to yourself – I’m sure someone along the line asked Chihuly when he was planning to get serious and find a real job. How many of us could ever imagine glass blowing as being anything beyond an interesting hobby? Chihuly did and then he paid it forward. Today students interested in this art form can study at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington which was co-founded by Chihuly.

Reconfigure loss as an opportunity – Adversity is a part of life and Chihuly wasn’t exempt. A car accident in 1976 took one of his eyes.  Then, in 1979, he lost the full use of one of his arms in a surfing accident. The damage to his body made it impossible for him to perform glass blowing anymore. He adjusted by hiring other glass blowers to carry out his vision. When asked about how he saw the impact of the accidents on his work during a 2006 interview, Chihuly shared that "Once I stepped back, I liked the view." He went on to point out that the change allowed him to see the work from an enhanced perspective. In the end he found he was more of a “choreographer than a dancer.”

 Chuilly’s story paints a portrait of lasting success anchored by the artist’s choice to live in alignment with his vision and values. Adopting a similar mindset naturally leads to doing the things that will ignite your passion and joy. Ironically, pursuing a wholehearted path wildly increases the chances of achieving the type of mastery that tends to result in outward recognition and admiration. At the end of the day, being famous or rich isn’t good or bad. The way we approach it, however, can be. The best chances of experiencing lasting fulfillment is to ensure our accomplishments are grounded in radical authenticity.