Principles: Measuring Success

I remember when I graduated, the world seemed to me as a tradeoff of opportunities and salary numbers.

There was an understanding that I would be trading my youth for experience, which would convert into wealth down the road. Seeing the big numbers earned by older, more experienced professionals, made me pay attention and want to accelerate towards success.

After chasing this idea of success for some time, I once chanced upon this quote from those daily motivation reads:

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.

Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

When I first heard this quote, I was taken in by its eloquence. But as I let it sink in further, I realized that it was highlighting a paradox about success.

If you want to gain respect through success, then it’s true that you can achieve it through quantifiable means. We respect people who have made lots of money, won many awards, or built huge careers. These are valid reasons that make us want to learn more about a person, which is also why you want to read their profiles to begin with.

But if you want to gain love through success, it can’t be quantified. The people who will be crying when you depart the world are not doing so because of any number that is tied to your name.

They cry because you were a loving partner, a caring friend, a compassionate and kind human. You are dearly missed not because of what you’ve earned, but because of what you represented.

The distinction is clear: Traditional quantifiable success will put you on magazines covers; while loving success is not measureable and will put you in family albums.

In Alice Schroeder’s book “The Snowball”, Warren Buffett has this to say about success:

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love it that you can’t buy it. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable.

It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

Things of Loving Success

Marrying Right

Obviously, if you choose to marry, then marrying the right person has enormous consequences. One of the greatest success stories of your life will be the result of your marriage.

When you marry well, you’ll have a person who loves and supports you through your triumphs and challenges, and you’ll learn how to do that for them as well.

You’ll have a continuous reinforcement of your values, knowing that your partner also shares the same values.

Happiness is amplified through this shared understanding of what’s important. Sorrow is eased through your partner’s presence during hard times.

This kind of relationship cannot be calculated or measured by numbers, but it attributes towards loving success.

Health

Humans have brilliant minds, sending rockets into space, composing music, and building economies. However, we are also bound by our bodies, constantly decaying towards inevitable death.

This means that everything we value flows from our physical health. Money is desirable only if you have the vitality to pursue it.

A career is meaningful only if you have the energy to keep it going.

Time with family can be vibrant only if you’re free from pain.

Our desires are often directed outward because that’s where we’re most aware of what we lack. But all those desires are nothing if we lack good physical faculties. By maintaining a healthy body, we are placing ourselves in a position to pursue our goals.

This type of energy is another form of unquantifiable success.

Compassion & Kindness

Society as a whole has one of the greatest sicknesses we have gotten accustomed to. We tend to treat people based on what they can offer, instead of the human beings that they are.

We often use status as a proxy for who to treat nicely, and who to disregard. This is because we’ve been conditioned to play the game of ascension in social hierarchy, and to gauge people by their position within it.

The most common benchmarks are wealth and job titles… a newer one being “number of followers” on social media. The unifying theme across all these is that they are all tied to an external label or number.

While this pursuit may yield money and accolades, the problem is that you will then begin to define yourself by the status differences you share with others. Your identity will be on shaky ground because the world will seem like a zero-sum game, where a peer’s success will yield envy, and a peer’s failure will yield glee.

Multiply this dynamic by billions of interactions, and it’s why society can indeed be so sick.

To opt out of this game altogether and treat people with compassion and kindess, no matter who they are; this is loving success.

The person that has no promotion to offer will receive the same level of presence as the person that does, and this equality of attention can be extended to our daily lives.

The immediate effect is that our interactions will be unconditional. But the long-term effect, which is even more profound; we will learn how to accept ourselves without condition as well.

Living Your Values

Your values are as unique as your genes because no one shares the exact set of experiences and insights that were required to form them.

Unfortunately, the world is an efficient place that seeks to standardize everything. People who reshape their values to fit the standard mold tend to be rewarded. This is most obvious in careers, where people are encouraged to learn a set of skills that lead to the safest outcomes. As a result, we often dismiss curiosities while trying to fit in.

To have loving success, we need to be able to navigate the world without misaligning our values.

At work, it means to be able to make a living without sacrificing our interests and ethics.

At home, it means to be able to listen to our loved ones without compromising on the right things.

At your community, it means to be able to form lasting friendships without relying upon flattery.

In each case, there is an anchor of authenticity that we are unwilling to budge, no matter how fervently people want us to.

Aligning ourselves in this way is difficult, but such is the case for the most meaningful endeavors in life. Difficulty requires ingenuity, and ingenuity is what makes us feel like we are working toward our potential.