What Does Success Mean to You?

The status game, defining success, and human flourishing.

I read

Simone Stolzoff

’s book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work this week. If you are (re)evaluating your relationship with work, it’s well worth the read.

There is a lot to say about the book (I may share more thoughts later) but given the holiday weekend I just wanted to highlight one section that particularly snagged my attention.

In the 8th chapter, “The Status Game: On the myth that status equals success,” Stolzoff brings together a number of useful ideas on values and success:

“When we say someone is successful, we rarely mean they are happy and healthy. We mean they make a lot of money. This is a truth Americans are hesitant to admit. When asked “How do you personally define success?” 97 percent of respondents in a 2019 survey agreed with the following statement: “A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.” But when answering the question “How do you think others defined success?” only 8 percent gave the same answer. Instead, 92 percent agreed that others would define a person as successful “if they are rich, have a high-profile career or are well-known.” In other words, the majority of respondents believed that others define success based on status, fame, and wealth, but less than 10 percent admitted to holding that same view themselves.” (p. 162)

Here’s the chart from that survey¹:

Source: Populace | Gallup Success Index

Think about what’s happening here. We are personally defining success in idiosyncratic ways - following our own interests and dedicating ourselves to the craft of developing and investing in them, believing that success is not zero-sum and that the comparison to others is not particularly relevant or useful to our own flourishing.

At the same time, we imagine others as defining success in highly comparative terms, as essentially the sum of our wealth and prominence.

Consider how frequently we make professional decisions, both passively and actively, to optimize for wealth and prominence. There’s a fair bit of mental gymnastics going on here, but when we do this we’re essentially solving for how we imagine others are thinking about our success.

Later in the same chapter, Stolzoff quotes the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen on why we do this:

“Nguyen told me, ‘[…] once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of value - especially ones that are shared across a company - that clarity trumps your subtler values’” (p. 165)

It’s just easier to adopt values that have a tangible expression (e.g., money, titles, promotions) than it is to decide (and stand by) the values you may actually prefer.

That same survey shows data on the attributes that Americans believe define success. When defining success for themselves it is comprised not only of a more balanced view, but status is the smallest portion. Compare that to when they consider how “others in society define success,” their perception is dominated by status.

Source: Populace | Gallup Success Index

Interestingly, how we think about the attributes of success from a personal point of view is strikingly similar to pathways to human flourishing:

Source: VanderWeele (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing.

I suppose what’s most striking here though is that status is nowhere to be found.

1. A note on the methodology for those interested, “Results for the survey items are based on self-administered web surveys with a random sample of 5,242 U.S. adults age 18 and older, who are members of the Gallup Panel. Gallup uses probability-based, random sampling methods to recruit its panel members.”