Success looks different from person to person, but the go-to for the self-help industry is a simple one:
A lavish home. Half a dozen owned sports cars. A gorgeous romantic partner and a bank balance that looks like a phone number.
Combined with a guru’s unfathomable knowledge and vast resources, the best of the best in the industry can make that a reality. After all, they’re walking examples of those individuals. And all of this is before we get into the thousands of articles discussing qualities that we should uphold and traits to develop.
We have all the theoretical tools to make that vision a reality, as we’ve been assured time and time again. And yet, we’re often at a stand still. Meanwhile, successful people break that narrative that others have built.
Bill Gates believes that we should be collaborative and relationship-building. But explicitly not with people who have been human trafficked.
Elon Musk once encouraged that we should appreciate different views and attributed that to his success. Now he’s tearing that notion down.
With each public crash and disgrace, these “successful” individuals have only gotten me more skeptical about this whole thing. It’s enough to make me look at that pristine presentation of success and ask…
Is any of that really true?
If you’ve seen any of my more recent work, the answer is an obvious yes. I can point to the fact that some people are nearing trillionaire status, and those same individuals are doing little to help people.
But if you need further proof as to why the common view of success is unhelpful at best, consider the following 3 aspects of genuine success.
Growth And Success Are Very Different
One of the reasons I think we distort success so much and why so many of us get it wrong goes back to Mark Manson’s Book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. In the opening chapter of his book, he mentioned something truly enlightening:
“Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.”
To have a millionaire like Manson say this is wild to me. Yes, there are some issues with this book as a whole, which I should talk about later, but he makes a valid point here. For a lot of people, we associate these two things together, and it’s especially blurry in the self-help world. Particularly when it’s coming from a wealthy self-help guru who is trying to save money for their next boat or jet.
As a result, it takes a lot of time for us to decouple this aspect, let alone realize that those who are successful aren’t always the greatest people. You still have several Elon Musk fans despite the fact he and his DOGE team have screwed over Social Security data. This is on top of the millions of lives Musk has affected as a crypto bro and head of Tesla.
Obviously, I can’t deny the successful individuals own wealth. However, what is debatable is whether we should take these individuals seriously and consider being their fans. As growers and improvers ourselves, it’s easy to look to those further ahead as examples to live by for sure. But these individuals are bad examples.
They’ve already “grown” and now they’re showing us who they really are.
Success Is More Sensationalized
Success feels good, and to be a success is to achieve something big for ourselves. It makes sense we want to stroke our egoes and put ourselves in a positive light. We want to feel good about it and celebrate it.
But there is a difference between celebrating it and really celebrating it.
Take success stories. These are often tools to pump ourselves up, and on the surface, they seem pretty harmless. But they have underlying effects on how we see success. Specifically, they push the same narrative that successful people are the “good guys” and that we should be like them and cheer them on.
And these stories paint these individuals as the underdogs—a time before they were so widely recognized and beloved.
Like with all things, we love stories and getting attached to characters. However, it becomes a slippery slope when those “characters” are people in real life. As we’ve seen with articles praising individuals’ own virtues, we see those individuals expressing the opposite. People for sure can make mistakes, and no one is perfect, but these stories don’t talk about that.
They don’t always share the full picture of what got these individuals to be in the position they’re in in the first place. We don’t talk about how a lot of those wealthy individuals today were saved by a friend or family member.
As a result, the perception of success and what it takes gets further warped. It’s easy to go for those dreams of grandeur self-help gurus sell rather than think about what we genuinely want ourselves.
Success Is Presented As One Note
But one of the biggest aspects that gets me is how one-note success is. Buying into the narrative that success is what I presented above (or similar) leads to a narrow-minded view of the world and of people. It forms hard biases that we convince ourselves time and time again are true. And it all culminates in a rigid concept and single-minded pursuit of what needs to be done in our lives.
On one end, I understand why we do this and why it’s necessary. Direction helps. And selling one specific path is easier than being vague.
However, I think there are other ways to frame that success is more than that. Merely being open-minded and encouraging others to think about what their version of success looks like. In addition, celebrating individuals’ own views of success and encouraging people to refine them in a more personable manner.
Doing so would solve one of the biggest issues that this one-note narrative has. The question of…
What happens if they’re wrong?
Success Is What We Make It
In order for us to grow as people, some form of standard is necessary. However, the more I see living examples of the successful people we’re looking up to bumbling around time and time again, it’s clear we need to look for better examples.
And in my experience, the easiest way to do that is to be looking around at people in our own lives. Better yet, this is presuming that we even want to or think it’s necessary to do so.
For me personally, success boils down to a simple belief that it’s what we make of it. It’s neither right nor wrong, and we can revise it over time. We can allow ourselves to use it if we need some guidance, but it’s really our call to make.
As a result, it removes a lot of the magic surrounding what success looks like and how it relates to our lives. It gives us a chance to have a healthier relationship with it. And most of all, it can help us grow as people.