Gone Fishin' - Why Success Matters

Here's a brief dispatch from the beach, where I try to avoid serious thinking in favor of allowing the waves to mesmerize me.

Just to emphasize the paradox of the random symmetry of life I must mention that the garage door broke just before we left, almost exactly three years after we arrived at the beach and received an email from our neighbor asking if we meant to leave the garage door open. We had not. It was broken then, and it is broken now. This time we left it closed and un-openable.

But that's nothing to do with success. Being at the beach can make a person wonder if success even matters. Being at the beach in a beach rental property that is also for sale for just over two million dollars can make a person wonder if there's any point in defining success in any other way than as having lots of money and power.

So I'm just going to leave you with this little bit of wisdom: success matters, and success is not about the ability to buy a beach house.

Here's the thing. I think the drive for success is built into us. It's intertwined with the desire for meaning. Sure, people put a lot of emphasis on happiness, and happiness is definitely desirable. Howevs, the positive psychologists who study this stuff have figured out that happiness is a byproduct of being in the state of flow. And the state of flow, as I've discussed in other posts, is a condition of being totally absorbed in an activity. Now this activity is not just any activity. To achieve flow, you have to be involved in something that is challenging, but not so difficult that it's frustrating, and you have to actually achieve mastery of that challenge - and then go on to create another satisfying challenge. It's a process kind of like riding waves, if you will.

And this is why I conclude that success is important. In flow, you are continually striving for a goal, then resetting your goal and striving for the new one. It's made up of series of challenges and successes, and this process is essential to happiness. Therefore, ergo, success is important to happiness, and if we all agree that happiness matters, it follows that success matters, too.

Image by Phoebe Amory 2015

Annals of Successful Parenting: The Null Set

In my Annals of Successful Parenting posts, I’ve danced around the topic of successful parenting, but I’ve never tackled head-on what successful parenting might be. Except to point out the two facts of parenting that I know for sure: 

1. Children are exquisite instruments of torture, fine-tuned to each parent. Just a couple examples: Say you’re an introvert with social anxiety; your child will be an extrovert who is miserable every time you stay home; or, just to pull up another random case, you are one of those people with a (completely rational, mind you) terror of vomit. In that case, your child will be a spewer.  One of those kids that gets a stomach virus once a month and regurgitates every forty-five minutes for twelve hours straight - all of them at night. I don’t think I need go on. You all know exactly of what I speak. In fact, why don’t you tell me how your children have morphed to torture YOU?
2. Parenting never ends, is largely unrewarded, is considered both very important by anyone who is a parent, yet completely worthless by our existing social structure; and so it seems as if the intersection of parenting and success must be nil. Or null. I’m talking Venn Diagram here.

This is no way to live. We need recognition. I learned that from Mr. Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People. At what point can you declare your parenting has been successful? When the child graduates from high school? When he graduates from college? Which college? When he gets a job? What job? When she produces grandchildren for you? Where’s her partner in this? When those grandchildren graduate from something? You see where I’m going here? Meanwhile, until some societally sanctioned outcome occurs, are parents to labor totally in the dark as to their children? 

The answer to that last one is, in short, yes. Of course. I mean, the labor the parent undergoes to bring a child up to that first societally sanctioned endpoint is gargantuan, takes about eighteen years, costs nearly three-quarter of a million dollars, and is largely unrewarded. 

Unless you look at successful parenting another way. Which, as I mentioned recently, regarding definitions that appear definite, I’m very happy to do. And really must do. Parenting is a terrific example of how success is both an outcome and a process. Parenting never ends, so if success is simply a particular outcome, such as getting into college, that is, as I’ve said, a very long time to wait to feel successful. But if success is a process as well as an outcome, then there are many ways to feel successful as a parent. And I’m not just talking report cards and roles in school plays and things like that. Those are also achievements of a singular, granular nature, gratifying but fleetingly so. No, I’m talking about something else. 

Now the other thing wrong with all those examples listed above is that they have much to do with the parent feeling successful because the child has achieved something tangible - but very little to do with whether the child feels successful. And that’s what really counts, isn’t it? Isn’t it? People? Am I right?

So, you want to feel successful along the way, while you raise the child. Otherwise you are in danger of projecting all kinds of goals onto them that are really YOUR goals. To avoid this fate, success can’t be about outcome only. It has to be about process. What is the process by which you are a successful parent? More important, what is the process by which you raise a successful child? I’d say it’s by helping your child handle life. 

Because really, what do we (and here I will revert to “I”, because I’m not going to try to speak for you, Readers) actually want for our children? I want my children to discover a passion, to find a way to work related to that passion that pays them money. I want them to be resilient, to be good citizens, to have well-balanced mental states, to accept disappointment without being crushed, needing extensive therapy or meds long-term, and to have several deep, meaningful relations with others. I’d love for them to fix the environment, or the political system, or to make great art, but I’m trying to be realistic. Today. I’d also like them to produce grandchildren and live near me and want to keep in touch. Not to mention to eventually rue the tight-mouthed way some of them have to speak to me nowadays - you know what I mean, don’t you? The speaking only when spoken to and answering by moving the lips as little as possible. Yes, I would like them to rue that.  

So then, how to achieve this ambitious list? Helicoptering? That keeps them close - at least for awhile. It could backfire, though, and send them reeling as far away as possible. Free range? That encourages their independence, which could actually work in your favor, via reverse-psychology, and encourage them to settle close by. 

Tune in next week, when I tackle this question, with a little help from a professional. 

Success is Like Light

Readers, I had an epiphany. I'll get to that. I also had a break. A break as in a piece of good luck, not a psychotic break. I know you were thinking either one was possible. Put away your schadenfreude, people. I’m still sane. 

First the break. To say it was luck is misleading. It wasn’t luck at all, actually. It was the result of an effort I made. I took a risk. It would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. Key to success in reaching a goal is setting smaller goals along the way and proactively pursuing them. That involves putting yourself out there, a.k.a., risking rejection.

So, I approached a person who is well-known, and I asked if I could interview her for my blog. And she said yes. Now, I’m not going to say who it is. This in part stems from superstition. I don’t want to jinx anything. Until it happens, I’m not going to really believe it happened. This is also in part my attempt to get you all curious and to keep you coming back to my blog to find out more. I'm not a natural self-promoter, but I know this is something self-promoters do. So I’m just going to say for now that this meeting will happen in the next month, in person, and I am thrilled.

“What are you going to ask?” the husband said. That part is easy. I can ask many questions about success. But his question got me thinking - imagining - picturing how the conversation would go. This person is a direct person. This person is a talkative person. This person - I pictured this person asking me, “Hope, how do YOU define success?”  

Here’s where the epiphany comes in. Because when I imagined answering this question, I pictured myself all too realistically; that is, I pictured myself hemming and hawing and tongue-tied and stumbling over how to reduce this topic, which I have complexified (see last week’s post for the etymology of this word. I am so James Joycean) beyond comprehension, to a few, clear sentences. Readers, I knew I would look like a total idiot if I didn’t have a blurbable definition. 

Then it came to me. In my mind, I was sitting at a little table with my interviewee who was also now my interviewer. There was a brick wall as a backdrop. I had my iPhone mic on to record this interlude. What is success? It’s not so complicated to sum up after all. Ready?

Success is like light. It has more than one form, depending on the situation. Success is an outcome and it is also a process. 

To me, this sums it up. My struggle has always been to find a definition of success that allows me to feel successful even when there is nothing tangible to point to as an obvious achievement. So much of life is working towards a goal; but only feeling successful at that goal’s achievement is awfully harsh. Often, especially in writing, the achievement is out of the writer's control. Furthermore, we all know that the good feeling of accomplishment at a job well-done is lovely - but fleeting. So my definition recognizes the achievement of an overarching goal, as well as a way of life that makes you feel successful. In this process, success is the byproduct: meaningful work, autonomy, mastery, purpose, mindfulness, connection. If you’ve got the process going, at any point you could take a snapshot and look at yourself and feel successful, even without obvious achievement to point to, because you are engaged in this process. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Wave-particle.jpg

I'll have more to say on this anon. Meantime, give this cool image a second look. Particle? Wave? Both.