Expectations and Success

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Somebody told me a story. A college student who wanted to go on and study 18th century English Lit in grad school hit a wall: his father. His father told him to do something practical, like be a doctor, so he went to medical school and became a doctor. He got married, he joined a private practice, he lived in a wealthy suburb of Boston. He was successful, no doubt. But he didn't love his work. Eventually, when his own children were heading into the teenage years, he left his practice and went to graduate school where he earned his doctorate in English Literature. 18th century English Literature. Because he started out "later in life," and because, presumably he wasn't as flexible about where he would live as a young PhD graduate has to be, he never became a full professor. He worked in adjunct positions and so forth. And yes, he was very happy.

Now I don't know this guy. I only know his story third hand. What strikes me, besides his interest in 18th Century English Literature, which is what I would have studied in grad school if I'd decided to go, is that what finally made the guy happy was doing work that tapped into his True Self.   As a private doc, he had a high income (this was in the dawn of HMOs and Managed Care), prestige, etc. But he was unsatisfied. When he changed to literature, he found work was inherently intrinsically motivating. (He also had a nice portfolio, equity in a home in a desirable neighborhood, and who knows, maybe a nice inheritance from the now-deceased paternal wall, but never mind. Bucking expectations takes courage, whatever the circumstances.)

What also strikes me is that success is often defined by someone else's expectations for us. If we are approval-seekers, or non-confrontational types, or just upper middle class strivers, we often sublimate our own interests in pursuit of Success.We might not trust our instincts about what we want to do (my situation), or we might just buy into our elders' world view without question. We may never question it (result: mid life crisis involving expensive car/plastic surgery/affairs) or we may finally (result: major change of career or marriage.)

Here's another story. As a graduate student in the early 1960s, she was at the top of her class; yet she never finished her PhD. Her classmates and professors all expected her to go on, but she didn't. She lost interest in the topic and chose not to. Instead, she raised a family and pursued her academic interests informally. She's pretty hard line about success. She "never accomplished anything" that people expected of her. Nothing to show, not known in a field? Not successful. According to her own inherited beliefs about success.

Neither this person, nor the late-blooming English teacher qualify as successful under such guidelines. However, this doesn't prevent them from feeling satisfied and fulfilled in life. And this is where my thoughts get a little murky. On some level, what I'm getting at is similar to those folks who dissect happiness or contentment or fulfillment. At the feeling level, these terms are somewhat interchangeable. This brings me back to where I started: at the macro level of success, visible, notable, recognizable accomplishments are the best indicators. Is it really any more complicated than that? What do the rest of us do then? Do we feel like failures until and unless we achieve at this level? Do we do what I perhaps have been doing and bring it down to the micro level, charting our mini-accomplishments, breaking our goals down into chewable size and swalling little tastes of mini-success? Or do we do what this woman does, and remove success from the equation of life? Does success matter?

Know thy True Self

courtesy of wikipedia/Gnothi_Sauton_Reichert-Haus_in_Ludwigshafen.jpg

The most unequivocal "yes" to my question, "Do you feel successful?" came from a friend I've known since 8th grade. She's a teacher, and just a couple of years ago, after a series of disastrous, disappointing, or just plain dull romances, she married a childhood friend. (That's another story, and quite romantic.) She told me she feels successful because she found something she enjoys doing and she does it well, she found a partner she loves to be with, and she was smart enough to know she didn't want children.

What really surprised me was what she said next. "I guess I have pretty low expectations, and that has made me happy."  

She said she's never had a "burning desire for fame," just the desire to be "comfortable," to wear what she likes, to drive a nice car, and to take "two five-star vacations a year." She's been nominated twice for Teacher of the Year, but hasn't won. She's happy to have been nominated and says she's glad her principal appreciates that she works twice as hard as everyone else to make sure she gets her job done right. "I've never thought of myself as the smartest person," my friend said. "I'm not ambitious. I don't read much. I like to watch TV. I'm no Susan Rice (a classmate of ours)." She said all this with the utmost acceptance.

Now I've always thought she underestimated herself. No, she's not an academic nor an intellectual, but she's bright, practical, and down-to-earth. I started to argue with her. But as I argued, I realized I was really arguing with myself for doing exactly what my friend does: assuming I'm on some totally different level from ambitious, successful people. This assumption upsets me and is probably why I spent so much of my early adulthood trying to prove that I am smart (my calculus went something like this: I hang with engineers and computer scientists from MIT, they are smart, and they like me, and they only like smart people, therefore, I must be smart) instead of doing something practical like earning money. My friend, however, was completely unperturbed. 

I thought about all I know about her, about how her parents wanted her to be a doctor or lawyer, and about how she struggled with those demands in her twenties, until she found her niche. My friend said that even when she tried law school, she never envisioned herself as a partner in a big firm, but rather as "one of the billion" lawyers at AT&T or some other company, "working in my little cubicle."

My sister's husband is a psychoanalyst. He said he would define success as living an expression of the True Self as described by D.W. Winnicott. While everyone in my "family of origin" has either been to a psychoanalyst or is one, I had to do a little research on Winnicott. Research is ongoing, but what I understand so far is that True Self is the authentic expression of personality, without concern for fitting into or living out someone else's expectations (that would be False Self.)  Winnicott was an object relations psychologist, and believed that child development occurs in the bond between infant and mother. In infancy, any action that is self-initiated, such as grasping toes, is considered an expression of True Self.  The response of the mother is crucial to the mix, creating the usual mess of False and True selves that make up most of us. And requires much psychotherapy when we grow up. 

I digress. But not totally. 

Other people who've identified themselves as feeling successful share my friend's realistic attitude.  Some of them had early ambitions that might be described as "burning," but discovered, in trying for them, that they weren't the right fit. There was a certain amount of shucking of other people's unrealistic expectations about them before they reached this point. (By the way, they all seem to have managed this shucking on their own. None of them, to my knowledge, has been in psychoanalysis.)

It is perhaps too obvious to mention, but I will anyway, that the stage of life a person is in affects how successful she or he feels. If I'd interviewed these people ten years ago, their answers might have been quite different. 

Nevertheless, I can conclude that people who feel successful share the trait of realistic self-knowledge, an open, honest self-assessment that accepts limits, eschews mountain-summit ambitions, and comprises awareness of intellectual and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps they've succeeded in living as their True Selves.

And perhaps that explains a lot of my feelings of failure.