What's the Point of Success
What’s the Point of Success If You Don’t Enjoy Your Life?
For much of my working life, I was very good at being responsible. I could take something complicated, work out what needed to happen and get on with it. Transformation, change, people, problems, projects — these were environments I knew well.
I had a successful career. I worked with major organisations, led significant pieces of transformation and built a reputation for being someone who could make things happen.
From the outside, there was plenty that looked like success.
Then I burned out.
Recovery gave me a lot of time to think, although not necessarily because I wanted it. When your body decides it is no longer participating in the life you have constructed, some questions become rather difficult to avoid.
One of those questions was about success itself.
Whose definition of success are we living?
Most of us don't sit down at the beginning of our adult lives and consciously design a definition of success. We accumulate one.
Some of it comes from our families. Some comes from education, work, culture and the people around us. We absorb ideas about what we should achieve, how hard we should work, what we should earn and what a successful life is supposed to look like.
Then we get busy living it.
Achievement can be particularly seductive because it is so easy to measure. The promotion. The salary. The business. The clients. The house. The qualification. The next milestone.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. I like achievement. I like creating things. I like making money. I enjoy seeing an idea become something real.
What I've become much more interested in is the cost.
Not because success has to come at a cost, but because sometimes we become so focused on achieving the next thing that we stop noticing what it is costing us.
Being capable can become its own trap
If you're somebody who is capable, people tend to discover that fairly quickly.
You become the person who can sort things out. The person who takes responsibility. The person who knows what to do when something goes wrong. And because you can do something, it is surprisingly easy to find yourself assuming that you should.
Over time, being capable can become part of our identity.
That can follow us into business too. We take on more. We solve another problem. We create another project. We help another person. We keep going because we're perfectly capable of keeping going.
Until, perhaps, we aren't.
My experience of burnout forced me to look at the difference between being able to live a particular way and actually wanting to live that way.
They aren't the same thing.
What is all this success actually for?
This became one of the questions sitting underneath The Minerva Manifesto.
What do we want success for?
If I want to make more money, what do I want that money to make possible? If I want to grow a business, what will that business give me? If I want greater freedom, what would I actually do with it?
It is very easy to pursue the symbol of something without ever experiencing the thing itself.
We can build a business in pursuit of freedom that leaves us permanently attached to our phones. We can chase financial success while never allowing ourselves to enjoy the money we're making. We can create something we once loved and then grow it into something we no longer particularly enjoy running.
At some point, I think we have to bring ourselves back into the picture.
Enjoy Life isn't the reward at the end
When I use the words Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life., the last part isn't an instruction to work as little as possible.
Nor do I think enjoying life means every day has to be wonderful. Life contains difficult days, boring jobs, responsibilities, grief, frustration, uncertainty and things we'd rather not have to deal with. That's part of being human.
For me, Enjoy Life is much more fundamental.
It is about not continually postponing our lives while we pursue success.
We can become remarkably good at telling ourselves that we'll enjoy things later. When the business reaches a certain level. When we have enough money. When this project is finished. When things settle down. When we finally have more time.
There is always another when available.
Perhaps the more useful question is whether the way we are living now contains enough of what matters to us.
Success needs to belong to us
This brings me back, once again, to self-awareness.
We cannot create our own definition of success without understanding ourselves. We need to know what matters to us, what gives us energy, what drains it, what we value, what we want more of and what we're no longer prepared to exchange our time for.
Those answers can change.
In fact, I think we should expect them to.
The life we wanted at 30 may bear very little resemblance to the one we want at 50 or 60. Our ambitions can change. Our relationship with money can change. Our priorities can change. We can decide that something we spent years pursuing simply doesn't matter very much anymore.
Changing our mind isn't necessarily evidence that we got it wrong before. Sometimes it is evidence that we're paying attention now.
Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life.
Those six words aren't three stages to complete in order.
They are a relationship.
We need businesses that work commercially. We are allowed to want financial success and independence. And we need to remember that our business and our money exist within a much bigger thing: our life.
There will always be tensions between the three. Sometimes business will need more from us. Sometimes life will. Sometimes making money will become the immediate priority.
The aim isn't perfect balance.
It is awareness of the choices we're making.
Burnout changed my relationship with success because it forced me to question things I had previously taken for granted. In many ways, those questions became part of the foundations upon which The Minerva Manifesto was eventually built.
I still want to create. I still want to achieve. I still want to make money.
I just don't want to disappear from my own definition of success in order to do it.
Because if the life we're creating doesn't contain enough of what makes it worth living, perhaps it's worth asking what all that success is actually for.
Explore The Journey
The Journey is an invitation to explore your own relationship with business, money, success and life — and to consider what you actually want all of it to make possible.
