Success Myths

What I watched: “Debunking success myths” by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Alex Banayan, and Todd Rose. Posted October 19, 2022.

We are awash in success porn. That’s what I call the onslaught of books, articles, videos, workshops, and influencer content that attempts to offer easy answers to achieving success.

There are no easy answers for any meaningful success.

Do this and you’ll make millions! Do that and your career will skyrocket! Do this other thing and you’ll be famous! This type of success porn feeds a hungry audience looking for ways to achieve without much effort, and success just doesn’t work that way. If you follow any of the social media influencer types trying to sell you these easy solutions, what you’re seeing is a carefully curated and edited image that may not align with reality.

We have a culture of success right now where all of us are putting these perfectly coifed pictures into the world. Everyone in the world is apparently crushing it except for you. And it’s like, “Ugh!” It doesn't work like that. We put this pressure on this generation to be so perfect. It's really hard to believe that you can become great.

But, you can become great. It’s just not likely to manifest in the ways you’re being told it should. Being copies of other people is not the path to success of any kind. You are unique. Your combination of knowledge, skill, and experience are unlike anyone else’s. Your background and life circumstances are unlike anyone else’s. Why would anyone think the path to any true success, regardless of how you define success, would be a set, well-worn path. Neil deGrasse Tyson says it this way.

If everyone had the luxury of expressing the unique combinations of talents in this world, our society would be transformed overnight. Your task is to find the combination of facts that apply to you. Then people beat a path to your door.

Todd Rose, Co-Founder and President of Populace, uses the dark horse metaphor to explain how some successful people prioritize personal fulfillment over the stereotypical notions we have about success. His organization found four elements they believe make up the dark horse mindset that if adopted can put us on the path to more fulfillment no matter where we are in life right now.

1. Know your micro-motives.

Typically, many people are motivated by things like competition, status, money, and so on. But the truth is that fulfillment doesn’t usually emanate from these externals. We’re all unique and our motivations are thus unique. Maybe you like organizing closets, or manipulating things with your hands, or any of several things not in the higher echelon of society’s markers of success. These are micro-motives. They’re important, They percolate underneath our larger motives.

By understanding these micro-motives, we’re better able to chart a more fulfilling, and therefore successful, path.

2. Know your choices.

It’s human nature to attempt to optimize our life choices to align with things that society tells us are important. But dark horse types are really good at realizing we are presented with a wide range of choices every day if we look for them.

Alex Banayan offers the concept of the “third door.” If you look across every industry, the highly successful could not seem more different from each other. But they share a common mindset.

Using the metaphor of getting into a popular nightclub, Banayan says there are the masses lined up in a long line waiting to get in. That’s the first door. Then there’s the VIP entrance, the second door, where all the wealthy and famous enter. Most only acknowledge these two entrances, these two paths. But there is always a third door, another way in, another way to achieve success.

Banayan recounts the story of Director Steve Spielberg and how he charted his own course to success by taking his movie business education into his own hands after being rejected from film school. I’ll let you watch the video for the full story behind Spielberg’s rise to being the youngest director in Hollywood’s history at the time.

One bit of advice a mentor gave Spielberg is something I say often – create a good deliverable. By deliverable I mean create something that’s a concrete example of your knowledge and skill. In Spielberg’s case it was an excellent short film that ended up getting him a movie studio contract. For someone else it might be writing a great book, creating a great art or graphics portfolio, or documenting some groundbreaking research one’s completed. Every business or interest has accompanying deliverables that can “prove” you know what you know and can do what you can do. It’s not only how you gain success, it’s also how you get great jobs, clients, and customers. Prove your value. Don’t just state your value.

Adopting a third door mindset will propel you to better success. What other door is open through which you might pass into the realm you want to conquer? There is always another way.

3. Know your strategies.

Most of the time when we’re told how to improve ourselves or achieve something, we believe there’s just one way to do that. There are always multiple ways, perhaps countless ways, to do it.

This reminds me of the imagery I reference often by spiritual teacher Ram Dass. He uses the pyramid to explain this concept. There is the point at the top of the pyramid. That’s the goal, the destination, the point of success. How do you get there? You can traverse up the pyramid in myriad ways and still end up at the top point. Your course might be a straight line or a winding path, but the result is still arriving at the top point.

Part of deciding on the success course best for you is understanding the scenarios of the future which Michio Kaku suggests means you need to understand science. And fostering optimism is important.

The optimists see the future, the bright side of the future, future that has opportunities. The pessimist simply says, “Ah, can't do it. Not possible. End of story. That’s it, folks.”  You have to have not just optimism, but you have to have one eye on the future. If you want to understand the future, you have to understand science. You’ve got to pay your dues.

4. Ignore the destination.

I alluded to this concept when I wrote Stop Dangling Carrots. Ignore the long-term destination because much of what might transpire along the way toward that destination is unpredictable and out of your control. Focusing too much on the destination means you end up not focusing enough on the journey.

We program children and young adults to think like this from birth. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Ugh, I can’t remember how many times I answered that question as a kid when family members and friends would ask. I had a pat answer ready, “accountant.” That’s what my dad did. It was as good an answer as any and it quieted down the questions. How can an 8, 12, or 17 year old know what they want to do and who they want to be 10, 15, or 25 years in the future? They can’t. Yet we keep asking that same damn question.

What we designate as success is not a goal. It’s a journey. It’s an ever-evolving, meandering, constantly course-correcting path that we simply can’t see before we start on that adventure.

I recently read Everything is aiming: forget the target and focus on your aim by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. It’s a beautiful explanation of why success relies on your ability to constantly improve your aim and not necessarily about hitting the target.

Successful people fuck up all the time. In fact, they fail more than those who play it safe and don’t accomplish nearly as much. The highly successful corporate CEO, Sarah Robb O'Hagan, offers this about her own success.

The truth is I've had some really embarrassing fuck-ups along the way, and I think it's important to see that those who’ve become successful have had all those moments of uncertainty, all those moments of, frankly, averageness. Every successful person in the world did not start knowing that they were going to get there. Pretty much every one of them did not start with these natural, God-given talents. It was a real story of willingness to experience and try things and then eventually figure out where you're going to thrive. And it's okay to not know where your true greatness lies because it is a process, and I don't care which generation you come from, I believe that that path exists for absolutely everyone.

How about you?

What’s unique about you? Are you ready to try lots of things, fail often, and try again? How are you special and separate from everyone else? What set of life experience, background, knowledge, skills, and passion can you offer in that delicious stew of your life that will not taste like anyone else’s. Only you can know. I hope you think about it, and thrive.

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