What’s Your Personal Version of Success Look Like?
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Self, Philosophy, Growth, Business, Entrepreneurship

What’s Your Personal Version of Success Look Like?

We all want success in life — here’s how you can not stop yourself from attaining it

Photo by Julian Jagtenberg from Pexels

Success is one of the most misunderstood things in our culture. Our brains usually associate success with the kinds of advertising images that have been linked to success through anchoring, a testament to the advertising world we find ourselves immersed in just about twenty-four seven. We think success is money.

When I ask you to close your eyes and envision what success might look like, what do you see? Seriously, stop and picture it — what’s your future success look like?

For most people, the answer to this question conjures up men and women in business suits, people sitting around on mattresses stuffed to the brim with money, massive yachts and high-rise condos, and other tangible objects that we believe come along with success.

We’ve seen these images associated with people we were led to believe are successful for so long that we, being the visual creatures we are, file these objects away in our brains as sure-fire signs of success. We conflate the anchors with the actual process of becoming successful.

Making Excellence a Habit

This is fallacious thinking. It’s an appearance-manner fallacy, where we mistakenly assume that something is given its authenticity by how it looks rather than what it does.

As the old saying goes, “You are what you do.”

Philosophers as early as Aristotle noticed the habitual nature of life, with Aristotle himself saying:

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Excellence needs to become a habit before we can be excellent at something. And no matter what it is that’s important to us in life, how can we be successful if we aren’t excellent at it?

Success Takes Work

When asked to do the exercise above, very few people (and usually the people who end up successful) picture themselves working tirelessly. Most people don’t conjure up images of themselves or others looking disheveled and wearing yesterday’s clothes. We tend not to picture ourselves so immersed in work that we’re calling our friends to sigh as we cancel our plans because we’re so dedicated to what we’re trying to achieve in life that we’ve prioritized it.

But which of those two images do you think better aligns with reality? Is it the condos, the yachts, the fancy clothes, the wealth and the riches? Or is it the dedication, using your time to do something you truly love, making a difference in people’s lives, and getting paid for it?

A happy, healthy, secure marriage is a successful one, regardless of what it may look like. This is because what we think something might look like and what’s actually happening are often two different things. Looks can be deceiving. We commit an appearance-manner fallacy when we believe that the authenticity of something is based solely on its looking like we think that thing will look in our minds.

A successful musician has mastered his instrument to a degree that’s undeniable might not have all the wild parties we usually associate with insanely successful musicians. Oftentimes, these people are just down-to-earth people who love their families, stick to themselves, and spend most of their time writing more music. Their music is their passion, everything else is a distraction.

Everyone wants to sell us this image of quick and easy success, even if we all know that in reality, life doesn’t work that way.

But is quick and easy success really success? Or is it just a historical accident?

Anchoring the Proper Images

These images are anchors, they’re ideas that were implanted in us without our consent or often even our knowledge and they’re important. After all, how can you direct your course if you’re aiming for the wrong things in life?

Anchoring is also an error in thinking, a heuristic that we make to simplify life whereby we compare the incoming streams of information to previous experiences to try and assess probabilities. This is how we predict danger and pursue pleasure.

We reference our past at every single moment of our lives as we try to sum up the present and possible future. If things were painful in the past, we learn to avoid them. If things were pleasurable in the past, we learn to chase them.

But success is generally a lot of grueling hours of not-so-pleasurable experiences and it pays off in the long run. That’s the cost of success.

Success requires that we sacrifice now for pleasure later.

If we want to chase success, we want to find the people who are doing what we want to be doing well. We want to seek those images and those habits out so we can learn to master them.

After all, as French philosopher and thinker Rene Girard pointed out, an unbelievable amount of human behavior is conducted through mimetics. We see someone doing something, we want to do what they’re doing, and we copy that behavior in hopes we get the same result. In the end, because we learn from others mostly by imitation, we’re all a lot more similar than we think we are. As Girard said:

“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.”

So How Do I Escape This Trap?

It’s safe to say, we have a tendency to conflate success, which is a state of being, with the objects that we falsely believe signify a successful person. We conflate a mode of Being within ourselves with objects that surround us in the world.

It’s a mistake in thinking to believe that if we can just obtain the objects of success, we’ve actually obtained success. What about someone who inherited all these things? Does putting on a certain outfit make you into someone else? I think not.

We have to envision the behaviors that can be expected of us on our path. Don’t know what those behaviors are? The best thing you can do is go and find people who are already doing it.

So many people end up making this mistake in life and chasing the objects and not success itself. That’s the first mistake they make on the road to success, not realizing that success is the accomplishing of goals. Success is our own personal growth and transformation as we master certain aspects of our lives that we wanted to.

We can avoid this pitfall by finding the people who are successful at what we want to be successful in ourselves. The next step is to mimic their behaviors, their attitudes, the things they do, the effort they put in, the work they accomplish, and much more — all until we get it right and habituate it ourselves.

Once all of these things become habits, we’ll be well on our way to success in whatever field we desire.