Defining Success
Tags: Success, CEO, Building, Business, Work

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

You can scarcely make a click without bumping up against one or more step-by-step guides to guaranteed success online. So common and so insistent are publications about our triumphs that it’s a wonder we manage to fail at all.

Such articles are most often found under un-cryptic titles such as ‘the definitive guide to guaranteed success’, ‘CEO Secrets that work for you’ or just simply ‘Be Like Bezos’. These Cosmo quizzes for the new-millennial claim to teach the ins and outs of becoming the ruthless CEO of our dreams. But how many of us have those dreams to begin with?

This generation’s ruthless CEO, in previous years, would have been Disney princess, astronaut, or ‘generic army hero’. Ambitions back then were perhaps a lot simpler than they are now. success was defined by owning a red car, Omega watch, or jumping from a perfectly functional helicopter. Today, that same level of success is defined by opening three new manufacturing plants of dubious ethical and environmental standards.

Setting the Bar High

An entire 50% of the articles available have titles, or at least subheadings of ‘Business Like Bezos’, or ‘Bezos Knows Best’. Whether it’s the attractive alliteration drawing people in, or that the Amazon CEO has unquestionably conquered the standard definition of success, it’s too hard to tell.

The multi-billionaire CEO certainly has a staggering set of credentials to his name. Even before recent events drove the personal wealth of the 56-year-old book salesman through the roof, and then some, Bezos had already achieved an all-time high-score. Worth some $180 billion or so at last count — it’s no wonder many consider Bezos to be the benchmark to measure against.

Controversially, some people have considered accumulating vast amounts of wealth to be a flawed measure of success. Open to cheating, manipulation, and large amounts of gaming — these people will tell you cash, as a measure of success, is about as flawed a metric as we could possibly imagine.

Gracefully avoiding taxes on billions of dollars of annual sales would be an excellent way to drive up your score, for example. In theory, this would drive up your grand total — adding extra wealth at every opportunity — while negatively affecting the number of points left in the game. Short term gain exchanged for long-term loss.

Pushing the limits of staff wages, employment conditions, and ethics are also great strategies if your overall goal is to extract the maximum possible from available resources — consequences be damned. However, there may be other ways to define success too.

Looks Like Success

Depending on your point of view, your personal definition of success can look very, very different indeed. If you’re not accumulating cash, things, power, or property — what might that success even really look like?

Sustainability? One of the most overrated and overvalued qualities of the modern world is the hyper-inflated work week. The desire, or expectation, to work 80+ hour weeks at the expense of sleep, care, hygiene, or social commitments is something which would be better left as an ancient relic of the 20th century.

Decades before the tech world got in on the game, the medical industry was pioneering methods and hours which blazed a trail in creating unnecessary accidents, avoidable mistakes, and professional burnout. Far from being a necessary evil of the field, the hours and methods implemented in medicine are thought to have held it back rather than driven it forward.

Yet, despite building a legacy of avoidable deaths and life-changing mistakes, they are techniques which continue, in many places, to this day. The divide, between fields which accept unsustainable hours as standard practice and those who don’t is wide and as arbitrary, is it could possibly be

Air traffic controllers, for example, saw the effects of grounding working practice in machismo and hazing; aligning their best practices in the opposite direction.

We know for a fact that both the quantity and quality of our output is better served by sustainable long-term working solutions. We know that our health, both physical and mental, is severely impacted by comparatively small reductions in sleep. We also know that excessively long hours and greater productivity are nothing but negatively correlated.

Photo by Valentin Farkasch on Unsplash

“All-nighters” are rarely more than an ego-trip of machismo and bravado. Used as either a measuring contest or a test of “character”. Used regularly, they demonstrate little more than poor management and a cavalier disregard for health. Add-in chemical assistance and you can multiply the results, almost exponentially.

Success can just as easily be defined as 30 good years in business as it can be by cash, premises, or power. Yet, it’s not a submission often written in ‘CEO Weekly’. I’ve yet to read the article which boasts about working sustainably, without intermittent health issues or long term degradation, in the same fashion as ‘pushing more hours’ or ‘going without sleep’.

Field of Play

Even if you’re utterly addicted to working 60+ hours weeks, where you put in that work and what you get out of it matters. A lot. Call it subjective, but selling the largest amount of plastic widgets, rubber doodahs, and carbon whatchamacallits isn’t everyone’s definition of success.

While some fields generate drastically higher scores than others; these scores don’t even closely correlate with real-world generated value. Stockbrokers, for example, earn drastically more than caregivers. Programmers earn more than most nursing staff. It’s certainly not because either of these two professions work harder or do a job inherently more valuable.

Success, the irritatingly immeasurable kind which you just can’t brag about, can easily be defined by working in a field you enjoy, have an aptitude for, or has an outsized positive impact on the world. The amount your chosen field pays is a randomly attributed score which you can, within reason, largely ignore.

Measuring Up

Much like stockbrokers, programmers, or salespeople, the sheer number of ’10 step success’ articles out there now is no indicator of their value. Their message invariably boils down to ‘keep plugging away’ or fail-till-you-don’t in many more words. The message can’t be faulted for its honesty or its simplicity — but only the metrics used to measure it.

Money, employees, power, or property are some of the poorest indicators of success imaginable. By any reasonable definition of the term they are, to all intents and purposes, useless. They will however, for a long time into the future, remain the standard definition universally applied.

Whether you’re chasing these metrics, or any other you care to mention, is largely irrelevant. So too is much of the advice available online. If you follow all of it, some of it, or none of it — the outcome will largely be the same. Far more dependent far more on the recipient than the writer.

But if you are going to choose one single, solitary piece of advice to ignore, make it ‘be like Bezos’.