On Success and Failure

This is going to twist around a bit.

One of the great lies this society propagates is about determination and success. It goes something like this:

If you really believe in what you want to do, and you work really hard at it, eventually you will succeed.

Even on brief reflection this is arrant nonsense, for what makes those who succeed so remarkable is that they have done so while many others have failed. Even people who have worked harder, with more determination, and for longer.

Our efforts towards achievement occur within a network of so many interconnected contingencies and just plain happenstances that to claim that the cause of anyone's 'success' can be solely ascribed to their personal effort is just ridiculous. Of course, nothing would occur without effort (except for within the ranks of the uber rich), but effort alone (assuming you are not uber rich) will not make you 'successful'.

This effort to success argument is endlessly repeated by those who have already achieved 'success', and as you will necessarily never hear from those who have not achieved that 'success' in the space in which 'successful' people proselytise to us, the room for any other argument is small. For example, you will never see a failed talk-show host on their own talk-show talking about how it is not just hard work that makes you a successful talk-show host because if you did, they would not be a failed talk-show host. Or, I often read of 'successful' writers claiming that you will succeed if you keep working hard at the writing etc, but of course you will never read in a major publication a failed writer writing about how they worked hard at their writing for fifty years but never succeeded, because again, if you did read it they wouldn't have been a 'failure'. (This blog an exception).

One of the reasons we so often hear this argument is that people who have achieved success often feel a need to justify to themselves and others the disproportionate possession of the world's resources (money) that success has given them. They like to tell themselves and us that it is not as a result of mere chance and luck they have become rich, but as a just reward for serious efforts undertaken by themselves, in the face of great hardship blah blah blah.

One danger in the hard work breeds success argument is that it makes people who work hard and don't succeed feel that perhaps they are not working hard enough, when in reality no amount of hard work is going to result in their success. It makes them anxious that perhaps they have 'failed' through their own fault when this is not the case.

Another danger is of course in the equation of success with riches.

I am wary here of seeming to put out some other trite platitude about the attainment of riches not being a worthy assessment of success, when for society-at-large, the attainment of wealth is seen as the evidence of success. Certainly the attainment of poverty is not often considered a successful outcome to an endeavour. But it is still valid to decouple the attainment of wealth from the attainment of success.

That might sound strange but I strongly believe it is important if you want to be happy. Now, this needs to be seriously tempered with the condition that whatever you do you have a modicum of material wellness. If you are skint you have no choice. But if we can get one step beyond this and assume just for the moment that you do have the ability to feed, house and put clothes on your family, only then can we talk about what personal success might mean beyond the admittedly large and first hurdle of getting a job.

In societal terms I myself have experienced a modicum of failure and success in my own humble measure. I have seen great failure and success in societal terms in others. I do not believe that really hard work has anything to do with it as I have worked just as hard and failed in societal terms as I have and succeeded in those terms. This is where this post is going to twist, for I have come to agree with the great lie mentioned above, so long as it is decoupled from the belief of success necessarily equalling wealth, and so long as we understand that a certain amount of material well-being must be present to satisfy basic needs. That is, you are not homeless.

[Parallel to this is the phenomenon I have seen repeatedly: That many people I have met who have attained wealth have not actuality chased it as an end in itself. The wealth has come as a by-product of chance, hard work and luck as well as, sometimes, bastardry. For we should never mistake, as the wealthy often do, the attainment of wealth with the practice of virtue. This common false attribution itself leads to all sorts of wickedness which I will not go into here.]

Conversely, I have known people who have attained wealth but not success if we equate success with happiness. I suspect this is because happiness needs to grow from a real personal achievement, and when someone becomes wealthy from sources not related to their own achievement; and they can not mislead themselves into believing otherwise, their wealth really does become hollow. I have known seriously sad wealthy people. Before I knew people like this I would have dismissed their sadness as affectation, and railed at their thanklessness to the fates that bestowed them such advantage. But now that I have sat with them, drank with them, heard their stories, I know that it is possible to be wealthy and a complete failure. I really pity them.

Of course I have also known happy rich people. Some are happy because they honestly believe they deserve their wealth. Some are happy because they can just accept and even revel in the sheer good luck they had to acquire wealth. Some are all these kinds in one.

But the truth within the great lie is that so long as you accept that whatever it is you do will probably not result in you being wealthy, if you completely separate being wealthy from being successful and replace it with a definition of success along the lines of the endeavour itself, then hard work and determination can get you great success, which for many is probably the mastery of some trade or activity.

For example, I have come to realise that for me personally the completion of my fourth novel has given me by far a greater feeling of success than the project of my last job. The novel will almost certainly never be commercially published, never make me any money, and has cost me a great deal both financially and in time. But I believe it works. It does what I set out to make it do. Or, I know it is the best that I can do at this time. I will shortly put it aside and start another, but for the rest of my life I shall notch it up as a really great achievement. My last job was no failure, it was a wonderful time and afforded me the ability to have time off to write the novel. But the job will fade in memory. My daughter in twenty years time will probably not even know what that job was, but I feel certain that if she reads the manuscript she will be proud. That, my friends, is success.