Roads To Happiness and Success

Who is happy?  The Dali Lama, Tony Robbins, that person you drool over on Insta?  Who is successful, Warren Buffett, Lebron James, Maya Angelou, Gandhi?  Being “successful” and “happy” are subjective.  A google search of either will return numbered lists of 7 Steps To Happiness or the Top 10 Secrets of Success, etc.  While these lists may be useful, I firmly believe that these subjects aren’t so easily met.  Happiness is a practice.  Not a result but an endeavor. Success has no secret and is the result of study and work like a sculpture emerging from rock.  A simple life can bring great success and a great person can also feel like a total failure. 

We all start from different places with advantages or disadvantages when it comes to being happy or successful as we define these terms for ourselves.  What I will boldly offer up is that a foundation for both success and happiness involves beginning from a place of honesty and committing to what we want.  It then involves following an evolving plan to get there despite ambiguity.  With some self care and time, eventually compound interest does yield extraordinary results and the trajectory of a life is changed.  This has been my experience to date and fuels much of my efforts every day.     

Begin From a Place of Honesty

How has your upbringing and past affected who you are today?  You may have had parents or role models that taught you great work habits, money habits, or modeled awesome and healthy relationships for example.  Your parents may have practiced gratitude and optimism and greeted you every morning with a huge picket fence smile.  You may have taken these things for granted as just the way people are.  Don’t take them for granted.  Be observant over your life to what seems to come naturally for you where it may not for others.  You are fortunate by these things.    

More likely, your parents and role models from your past were flawed, sometimes severely so.  While these things or your past do not define you, it is unrealistic to think that you can be fully successful and happy without getting to a healthy place of reconciling your past.  In some cases this may even be a long road of dealing with past trauma.  

Before reading “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” for example, it may be more beneficial to your long term success to spend the time reconciling how your father always told you that you would be highly unsuccessful and never amount to anything.  How does this affect your behavior and models about the world today and how may you repair and use this knowledge to your advantage.  More subtle examples might be shaming mistakes rather than learning from them, irresponsible financial behaviors, or bad relationship patterns that you model from your parents. 

This first point about beginning from a place of honesty in some ways is the most precarious and it borders on psychology and mental health.  However, in my experience, these types of issues are not the exception but the norm.  We all have them despite the illusion of normal.  Those of us that begin from a place of honesty are far better off over the long term in addressing these things and getting help along the way such that we may be happier and feel more successful.

Desired Outcome: Knowing What We Want 

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

Yogi Berra, epigramist and baseball player

The first step to getting there is knowing where you are going.  Are you happy?  What would it take for you to be successful?  Most of us kind of only vaguely know the answers to these questions and that’s ok.  In my experience, this is normal.  The words “happy” and “successful” are highly subjective.  The definition of these words for each of us is based on our personalities, our sense of identity, our personal histories, and our cultures.  Our definitions may change with age.  We may grow to desire what is lacking and take for granted what we have plenty of.  The pendulum may swing for only to return. 

However does this imply that we should not try to create what we want?  No, we absolutely should endeavor toward what we want.  There are many methodologies that can help clarify what we want and I will cover some in a future article.  However, for the purposes discussing this foundation for success or happiness, we can’t be agents for what we want without first committing to what that is. We may not know what our ideal career looks like for example but we may know some things that we like to do and some things that we clearly despise.  This is a starting point.  We need a destination to move toward and plan around.  The next step is to move forward despite ambiguity.

Will Do: How to Get What We Want

One of the more powerful lessons I learned from spending many years in new product development and startups has been that those who plan well and then iterate the fastest to incorporate changes and learning, get the best results.  Pivot or die is a successful mantra for operating in ambiguous environments like startups or life.  We must hold close our aspirations and then plan to get there.  We must adhere to these with conviction.  At the same time, we must be open to unexpected changes and new information that comes our way.  We must be agile in adjusting and pivoting repeatedly and updating our plan based on what we learn.  This balance of conviction together with agile change is a difficult concept for many to grasp but I believe an essential one.   

We may be thrown curveballs in life and end up somewhere a little different from where we set out.  However, we will be much closer than if we had not committed and worked toward a destination in the first place despite ambiguity.  Moreover, we may arrive exactly where we want to be even if it is not where we originally set out toward.  At minimum we will have come a long way.  Often it is trajectory that matters most. 

Change Your Trajectory

In a past article on growth mindset, I asked what if Michelangelo had been grabbed by a time traveller at age 12 and shown the Sistene Chapel?  If asked to simply copy it he may have thought the task impossible.  He may have given up painting altogether if held to that standard of excellence.  However, this is short sighted.  Our individual successes or failures matter far less than our trajectory over a life.  I’m going to get fancy and explain this with a visual:

If you do not take any action, your current life trajectory will not change. This happens to be Newtons first law of motion and that guy was a straight up genius. What is the single biggest piece of low hanging fruit that you could bite into to change your trajectory in life just a little bit? If you want to run your own business some day, for example, but you currently work as an analyst at a giant corporation, you need to take action. Maybe interview for a role at a small business to begin to learn the ropes. This one resume submitted could entirely change your life trajectory.

If you were aiming at a target on Mars but you were 2,500,000 miles off target, all it would take is an adjustment of less than 1 degree in your trajectory to hit the bullseye. The point is that small tweaks in a trajectory can result in huge changes in results after applying effort (velocity) over time. Rather than looking at an ultimate goal and feeling overwhelmed and unsure if the destination is 100% exactly what we want, we make small changes in trajectory. Single successes or failures are meaningless compared to the cumulative effect of many small trajectory tweaks over time. 20 years of tweaks and you may be basking under your own Sistene Chapel.

Foundations for Happiness and Success

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

Albert Schweitzer

For me personally, happiness is about something absolute and turning inward where as success is more relative to others and looking outward. However, happiness and success mean something different to each of us. I will not claim to have a universal secret to either. However, I do believe that there is a good foundation for pursuing both in the main points discussed herein:

• Begin With Honesty: Begin from a place of honesty and self reflection about who you are and where you are. What comes naturally to me (these are gifts) and what are some of my challenges?
• Identify What You Want: You may never be 100% certain. This is normal, however, committing is necessary to begin to move in the general direction of happiness and/or success.
• Conviction with Agile Change: Move forward with conviction while being agile to change when unexpected developments and new information warrants it.
• Change Your Trajectory Iteratively in small steps To Change Your Life in big ways

These steps have served me well over my life and drive much of my every day. This foundation together with some self care for maintaining physical and mental health are as powerful as anything I have explored for living a life outside the maze.

What do you think? Any questions or advice that you would add? Let me know in the comments below.

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