So. Success, huh?
Elusive bugger, isn’t it?
Is that because its hard to get? Or even feel?
Maybe its because we have this weird tendency to use other peoples versions to compare our own, or lack thereof, to it. Which, awesomely, means that if we don’t meet those standards of success, we are pointless losers and that our lives wont mean anything in the playout of life?
I mean… maybe?
But you could honestly say that about anyone. All lives are meaningless or all lives are meaningful, sort of thing.
Wait wait wait, ill rephrase that a little. All lives are POTENTIALLY meaningful. But it kind of matters how we measure something like meaningful. Which is exactly the same for measuring something like success.
What the hell do those words even mean?
No, Shona, I don’t really care about the dictionary definition. That’ll give us a guideline. And something about “achieving a set goal” for successful or “attributing value to a thing” for meaningful.
I think the far more important question though (as always…) is what those meanings actually look like for you, as the individual person sitting there reading this, being a meat popsicle with its very own thoughts and feelings and gurgles post food. Because that popsicle, ultimately, it the one that gets to decide if the feeling it has about a thing it did or didn’t do is worth having or not. Joy and shame are pretty polar opposites when it comes to humans. I’ve heard, anyway.
Anyway, abstract feelings stuff aside, where our ideas of success and meaning come from do matter. Because that can have a profound impact on how we attribute… value to what the actual thing is being aimed for.
Let’s just say that good old dad was a fan of… Buddy Franklin. Deservedly so, he’s pretty handy at the old Foot of the Ball game. And dad used to say things like “you want to be a good footy player, kiddo, watch that bloke play.” And because you were just a little kid, you ACTUALLY BELIEVED HIM! To the point where you got it in your head that to be anything less that Buddy Franklin meant you weren’t a good footy player. And you could apply that to nearly any top shelf athlete. Usain Bolt, Miranda Kerr, LeBron James, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, Gary Ablett (Snr or Jnr), Louise Savage.
Not just athletes. Coaches, motivational speakers, directors, parents, actors, inventors. Bloody ART, for chris’sakes. Imagine thinking to yourself “I’ll never be as good as Meryl Streep, no matter how much I do to be like her. Huh… I guess this acting stuff isn’t even worth bothering with then…”
Are you 195cms tall, weigh about 110kgs and can run a hundred meters in about 11 seconds? No? Well, guess what? You aren’t Buddy Franklin. Better quit then, right? Tough gig, most of us aren’t built like that.
Did you dedicate well over half your life to use those physical gifts in the pursuit of being as skilled and capable of playing the game as Buddy? Also no? Weirdly, that also means you AREN’T BUDDY FRANKLIN.
If I had to speculate, and I am definitely putting words in the mans mouth here, but I'd guess that at times even Buddy Franklin doesn’t feel like that version of Buddy Franklin™. When he was struggling with his mental health, maybe one of the factors was the amount of pressure the man felt to live up to the capacity he had to play the game, day in day out.
What if that’s how burnout happens? We push and push and push to be something that just isn’t what we would have picked for ourselves to aim at, but because we don’t have any alternatives, we don’t know what else to do. So we just slog away at what it seems like we “should” do.
Sounds shit. Especially when the seeming alternative to fear of failure, is a fear of success.
If we can’t reach the dizzying heights of GOAT standard success (that stands for Greatest Of All Time, in case you were wondering) and that’s rendered all feeble attempts to try feeling a bit pointless and hollow, we abandon the attempt at anything else.
We sabotage the token efforts we begin to make (so we can at least be seen to be doing something…) because we just don’t believe that we can meet a standard that will be acceptable. From ourselves, or society at large. So, we effectively fail before we actually, genuinely try. Because that will at least mean we never had to put EVERYTHING into what we were doing and still find out we just aren’t good enough to be Jeff-Bezos/Elon-Musk-space-rich at the end of it.
And that’s without even mentioning all the other factors that may be playing out within us like “do I even deserve success?” or “well, I’ve been shown time and time again that success just isn’t a thing I can have…” Or even “Everyone who’s successful is an arsehole arrogant tosser! Why would I want to join THAT club?!?”
But, and here me out, what if we didn’t use those people and those numbers and that old shit as the standard for what is and isn’t worth succeeding at?
What if you came up with your own ideas about what success looks like? What meaning looks like?
What if those things came from just you? And what your heart and soul actually want, rather than what you think you’re supposed to want?
What if, huh?
Maybe, just maybe, you could find a level of success that you fall in love with. That isn’t dauntingly huge and overwhelming, but also isn’t self-sabotaging-ly lacking in ambition.
As always, who are you, and what do you want?
You aren’t that list of people I just rattled off before. You’re you. Not better, not worse. You.
Let them be them. That’s not you. They have different standards and gifts than you do. Again, not better or worse. Just different.
You feel what you feel. You think what you think.
What if you just owned that, and used that to build your own measure of success? That there is a standard of success that represented you, wholly and simply. Because, in the end, its your life. Not the best imitation you can do of Buddy’s. or Meryl’s. Or your parents’ ideals for you. Or what you think society wants from you.
What if the measuring of meaning in our lives was based around how we feel about the things we do and achieve and add to this world, rather than a dick measuring contest about who has the biggest number in a swiss bank account?
You are you. Not them. So, you will have different strengths and weaknesses than them, different values, different outcomes.
Try falling in love with what you can do, would love to do. Everything else is hopefully just a template, an example, of what living according to the value that is in all of us might allow us to feel like.
Be kind, be smart, be your best you. No bar fights.
“Comfort and the fear of change are the greatest enemies of success.” Jeanette Coron
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