The (sort of) Success Formula
Results may vary
Have you wondered why you think you aren't successful because you aren't disciplined, but then you meet someone whose life feels like hot mess, and still, success comes to them. They are always late to the meetings, probably miss deadlines and still clients are lining up to work with them. On the other hand there is the friend of yours who is super disciplined, works like clockwork, nothing out of order but never manages to get the kind of success they desire.
Or maybe you think success comes from hard work, but then we all know that one person who seems like all they do is have fun, be lazy, watch 25 shows in a week, and then still they keep climbing the ladder at a much faster rate than another friend of yours who has no fun in life. Maybe you remind yourself that its not just hard work, but it is smart work. But deep inside, you know that it isn’t the whole answer.
I know I had those confusions. Advice was given like definitive “rules of the game”, and yet it was being completely ignored and those people were still winning. What did I need to succeed? It is a perpetual question but I would say I have over the years developed a deeper and boarder model of it. Today, I want to talk about what success is, and how all the counter intuitive advice that you may have heard about it can all be true simultaneously.
Strap in, this is a long one.
Part one, what is success?
It’s a hard one to attack as is, so I want to divide it into two parts. There is an inherited definition of success, which is what the relational part of your mind wants. Things that your parents, your family, your society says are the markers of a life well lived. A big house, a great job, big car, fame, prestige, everything in the checklist of being a “good kid”. This is deeply encoded from childhood, seeing your parents’ aspirations or lack there of, and how society treated them, how they treated themselves and each other. Maybe they also transferred the same to you, or maybe you just subconsciously kept absorbing them. For me, it meant getting straight As, being a kid who was not a bother to my parents, academically and behaviorally. You also absorb these definitions as you grow older, what your friends are getting, and how you see them, maybe you want the things that make you respect them for yourself also. Try as one might, we can’t completely get rid of it. Deep in our DNA we are social creatures, we want to keep harmony with our tribe.
The other part is emergent definition of success, which often comes from your lived experiences. As you go through life, you figure out the edges of what makes you “you”. So, beyond the checklist you inherited, you start building your own checklist of what a good life looks like to you. You want to “make an impact”, “change the world”, “be the most/best/greatest”, “find happiness”, etc. These are part self-actualizational and part self defining. Most of the times they are closely related to what we believe we need to do to be coherent with our own internal definition of who we are. If you think you are a good person, giving money to a cause, doing things for your family, taking care of those you care about, all will reinforce that idea, and in turn feel like a “success”.
I have found that you need both. In most cases, the inherited definitions signal safety to our system and the emergent definitions signal meaning. Both are necessary. Both are important. At least if you want long term to feel a sense of belonging to your life, both within yourself and in the world you inhabit.
For the longest time, since maybe when I was 19 y/o and got a bunch of fail grades in college I have kept rejecting the inherited success definitions. As someone who was a straight A student all my life, and school mostly felt easy, a fail grade was not understandable for my brain. I only resolved that by abandoning the idea of grades, and “conventional” (inherited) success. It made for an interesting life, choosing to do things that felt interesting to me, and it has been a very rewarding and meaningful path. But it also made my system permanently at alert, because I was not giving any sense of safety to myself. It made me, for a decade be in a constant state of movement, always moving towards the next thing, chasing meaning as if a tiger was running after me.
It’s only recently, in the last few years, maybe because of age, maybe because of changing life circumstances, that I have managed to actually accept that some of the inherited success metrics also I can allow myself to have. As I got some space from the events that caused me to create that dissociation with the inherited success metrics, as I let myself breathe, I could hear the smaller quieter voice inside me that after all did want some amount of conventional success. And making space for that has brought immense internal peace to my system.
But of course, just defining the categories itself is not enough. What you consider success is still dependent on your life, your history and your circumstances. That's why what might be success to you may not be to others. The inherited definitions can often overlap with the community you are a part of, and if you are someone who has low tolerance for external dissonance, and higher tolerance for internal dissonance, you might lean into those. On the other hand if not being in resonance with yourself can give you nightmares, chances are you will end up living a life with more external dissonance but with the knowledge that you are doing what “you” want.
As counterintuitive as it may be, people who have the opposite style as you may be capable of as much happiness on their path to success as you are on yours. Because choosing the goal is only the first half of the problem.
Part two, how to get to it?
So, you have figured out what you need to feel successful, but how do you “get” to the top of the proverbial mountain?
I have an analogy for it. Any sort of success is like a cup, and you could fill the cup in a variety of ways. Some of the ingredients that you can put are things that you have more readily available than others. Stability, access, money, time, energy, hard work, intelligence, luck, opportunity, inspiration, creativity, discipline, confidence, courage, resilience, privilege, community, genetics, your physical location, your psychology, your risk appetite, your failure tolerance, your ability to bounce back and many more things can contribute to your success. There is no “one” factor that will determine everything.
There is one more catch here. If you try to fill it with a singular thing, it will get harder and harder. Each new unit of hard work will add less to the overall success and potential for growth. If you were reliant on luck, you will need to be luckier and luckier to keep hitting the success. So often times, it might be much easier and wiser to add more things in the mix than doubling down on the one strategy that works well for you.
If I am trying to make a new artwork, just a creative idea will not work, regardless of how creative it is. I will need the discipline to actually sit down and finish the work, the courage to put it out there. Possibly the luck that I have a community around me that support me in all of my endeavors. All of these contribute to a potential for success, some for the success of the work itself and some for my success as an artist.
I have often found that people have a few tools in their toolbox, things that they are really sharp with. Maybe someone is really intelligent and disciplined, and they try to solve all problems in front of them as problems that can be solved by intelligence or discipline. And when they find problems that can’t be solved by those, they assume this is not doable for them. That this is the limit of how much success they can get. You know that metaphor of if you have a hammer all problems look like nails? If the usual whip you move yourself with is self-criticism, there is only so much it can do for you after a point, and you will need to maybe add some rest, or some joy or play.
As an aside, if you keep using the same tool for too long, it will lead to an emotional burnout. A feeling of “what is even the point” because well, even though you are pouring yourself into it. Because burnout is nothing but a sustained feeling of lack of success, like trying to fill a bottomless well.
Different successes are different cups where things might be more or less effective as well. Want to be an influencer? Luck really needs to play a strong role there. Want to be an athlete? You may need luck but resilience is far more important for that. Lets call these the critical/must have components of the flavor of success you are trying to get to. Each cup has its own traits, that’s why some cups are possibly harder for you to fill than others. If you don’t have any of the “effective” tools for a particular kind of success, you might have to work really really hard to get to just average. On the other hand if you find something where your natural advantages can all stack, success will feel easy, almost like a cheat code.
For example, when making art, I have found that there is no substitute for hard work. There is no “smart” work way of it. No amount of creativity can get me out of it. Success will come from repetition not creativity or intelligence. I need to repeatedly make art to actually get better at it. Ironically, creativity is not enough for it. I need to put my sweat and tears into my work also.
A lot of self awareness is required for this, to be able to honestly look at your strengths and weaknesses. And looking at what you’re trying to do, and what might be different ways to achieve it. That’s also a critical thing. We are often stuck in the headspace of finding the one right answer, but there is no one right answer. There are many ways to solve the same problem of success. You want to make money? You could start your own business, do a job that pays really well, purchase property and find ways to flip it at the right time, invest in the market in the right ways. Success at the goal of making money can take many paths, and some would be more suited to you and others may completely run counter your instincts.
The key question isn’t “will I be successful/can I be successful” but “What am I built for, and what am I willing to build towards”.
Part three, privilege.
And complicating all of these are ideas of privilege. Because privilege is like starting with some part of the cup full. You don’t even realize that it is full, because well, according to you, you are still pouring yourself into it. Privilege can come from many different places, but it could be that you come from a family of business owners and you want to start your own business. Chances that you will find mentors, knowledge, capital are so much higher. On the other hand if as a child of business owners you wanted to be a musician, it might be harder for you in some ways, because you don’t have as much artistic inheritance.
There isn’t anything evil about privilege. As a friend told me when I asked him why he doesn’t feel guilt for his privilege “You have to play the cards you are dealt the best that you can.” So I try to be aware of things that give me a leg up, but I still want to be earnest in how best I can play my cards, and how best I can use my strengths.
I suspect that my definition of success will evolve as I grow older, my values and my relationships change and my sense of self expands. Knowing all of this, having the cup metaphor, better definition of success and awareness of my privilege doesn’t make the path to success easier or the sting of failure lesser. But it makes my feelings around success clearer. So I am not comparing the state of my cup to theirs, not comparing my weaknesses to their strengths. I know there isn’t a success rulebook, and all advice of what is essential is more about the speaker than about the listener. And after chucking the rulebook away, things become simpler, even if not easier.
Speaking of success, this was a really fun illustration that I did for someone’s PhD thesis paper. They were based out of delft and they had done a research project on developing AI for chemistry. This is before the era of gen AI but it is still an illustration I love oh so dearly.
Thanks for reading this one. It was a really fun one to write but I also feel like with most of these self model ones, there is a tiny part of my mind that says “dude no one cares” so it is useful for me to put it out there, maybe hope it resonates with one person else and so that voice can be reassured that some people do care, even if everyone doesn’t.