Your finest moment is now
Not long ago, I spoke to my best friend from university. She is a hilarious, wise, accomplished woman who happens to be the CEO of a publicly traded company and mother of two brilliant children.
Of a mutual college friend, she remarked: “He has his own lab at Duke.”
After hanging up, I looked around my living room, with its cheap drapes, scrappy second-hand chairs and fine misting of cardboard from shredded cat scratch mats.
The life I’ve worked so hard to create felt insignificant. The space carved dowdy, the achievements miniscule.
My mind’s eye framed a mental cartoon of my life as a mole-hill next to mountains so lofty their rugged peaks were lost in clouds.
This mood, in subtly changing shapes, stuck with me.
It wasn’t until reading The Myth of Normal by Doctor Gabor Maté that the needle bounced in its groove.
“The most common form shame assumes in this culture is the belief that ‘I am not enough.’ The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel… suffered depression from an early age. ‘I was intensely downcast,’ she chronicled… ‘I thought if I could be good enough at whatever task, great or small, that was before me, I might have a few minutes of happiness.’”
That stopped me cold.
To what extent do I buy into that? And to what extent do I potentially, if unwittingly, feed that mindset?
Write To Success aims to help people develop the communication skills they need to thrive in college and beyond. But is the name itself sending an unhealthy message?
Write to Success implies that success is out there, ahead, in the future. Ergo, not yet achieved.
What if, instead of focusing on what we haven’t, we celebrated what we have?
What if I am — we are — already a success?
Fear of the ‘s’ word
Comparison and competition are the twin engines of capitalism. There is always someone better, some goal unmet, some category from which we are excluded.
Wired into that, is the fallacy that if people — especially young people — feel successful they’ll slack off.
Education too often seems predicated on the notion that learners have to be driven by fear of failure — specifically, by the shame our culture attaches to failure: take, for example, the hideous aphorism ‘second place is first loser’ or the relentless glorification of ‘greatest of all time’ achievers (never mind that is a fleeting title).
If it’s true that success breeds indolence, why do the Rolling Stones still tour? Why does Lee Childs continue to churn out novels? Why does Martin Scorsese make films?
Less pain, more gain
Fear driven strategies can work, for a while.
“Conviction of one’s inadequacy has fueled a great many glittering careers,” Maté notes, “and instigated many instances of illness, often both in the same individual.”
But, as teachers know, students bludgeoned with dire warnings of failure don’t all become strivers. Plenty — maybe even many — respond with passive disengagement or active resistance.
And why not? What is inspiring about being told that what you’ve done isn’t good enough and the best you can hope for, by gymnastic efforts, is a ‘better future’?
A more pragmatic, sane, humane starting point would be: you are a worthwhile and worthy human being, a success. Let’s build on that together.
Success is where you find it
Anyone can be successful or unsuccessful — it’s a matter of perspective.
This week, I asked one of my students about his recent math tournament.
“It was okay,” he said. “I got second place. In the nation.”
“What? That’s amazing.”
“Not really, I tied.”
“For second place in the nation! Of 365 million people.”
He sighed: “Not that many compete.”
We jousted; he insisting his achievement was hardly an achievement at all and I that it was incredible, exciting and worth jumping up and down about.
We called it a draw.
It’s kind of a funny story, but it also makes me sad — for him, and for everyone who’s ever been snowed (and who of us haven’t?) into thinking that it’s not enough.
Let’s stop getting smothered in those drifts and declare: it is enough.
This is not an original observation, but here goes:
The vast majority of what makes the world liveable on the day-to-day is never going to be valued. But that doesn’t make it not-valuable, it makes it invaluable.
Anyone who has ever
Tended a plant
Nurtured a child
Made art
Cared for an animal
Fed someone, or themselves
Said ‘I love you’ and meant it
Let someone cut in line
Comforted someone
Put fresh linens on a bed
Helped a stranger, or a friend
is a success.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Feel it for yourself. Write it.
Grab a notebook or open a doc and write a true story about yourself: write about how you care, how you show up for people, how you nurture yourself. Write about yourself with the generosity with which you’d celebrate the achievement of a loved one.
Repeat as often as you like.
My bet is the more one celebrates and acknowledges their successes, the more one cultivates the energy, resilience and curiosity that fuel new achievements.