Johnny Cash said, “Success is having to worry about everything in the world except money.”
Could your idea of success be limiting your potential?
Whether in life, at work or with money, the word “success” is used so often. And that does not necessarily need to be a foul thing. It works since it is changeable – everyone can provide you with their very own definition. In addition to the legendary Man in Black, listed here are a couple of other classics from undeniably successful people:
- “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it,” said poet Maya Angelou.
- Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer said: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you do, you will be successful.”
- Orison Swett Marden, Founder Success In 1897, The 40 Fingers magazine, one among the primary publications on self-improvement, wrote: “Success is measured not by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have met and the courage with which you have continued the fight against overwhelming odds.”
- And one among my absolute favorite quotes from Sir Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: what counts is the courage to continue.”
An excerpt from this last quote is the main focus of this text: “Success is not final.”
The creator can have been suggesting that success will be fleeting, and indeed now we have all heard many stories of going from wealth to poverty. (It looks like there are entire TV channels dedicated to such topics, doesn’t it?) But is it also possible that when we reach a degree where we consider ourselves successful, success becomes a limiting factor?
This query was recently asked to me by my colleague and co-author, Tony Welchwhen he noted that confirmation bias can lead individuals who have achieved self-determined success to conclude that they have to be right – about every part. They may conclude that they needn’t change or proceed their personal or skilled development because they’ve already made it. Unfortunately, their current success could also be causing them to miss out on entirely different levels or channels of future success.
And that is smart, right? Imagine for a moment that you simply come from a modest middle-class background and you’ve got definitely made it. You’ve worked hard, graduated, and surpassed your parents’ financial success—possibly even your personal hopes and dreams. You’ve won the sport, right? And because of confirmation bias (more on that in a moment), your belief that you simply’re undeniably successful can lead you to conclude that you simply’re the exceptional anomaly and that anyone else who tells you to alter or improve further is definitely unsuitable.
I do not mean to attack you – us – here, because that is just how we work. “Confirmation bias is the tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas,” says behavioral economist Shahram Heshmat. “Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same evidence and feel confirmed by it. This cognitive error is most pronounced for deeply held, ideological or emotionally charged views.”
Yes, politics and religion stands out as the first things that come to mind when we expect of deeply held, ideological or emotionally charged views – but what involves mind most is our belief that we’re fundamentally right.
That is why behavioral economists call it “the fundamental Attribution error,” which professor and creator Richard Thaler describes as “the bias that causes us to overestimate the role of personal characteristics and underestimate the role of situational factors when explaining other people’s behavior. When someone else does something, we tend to think it’s the fault of the person rather than the situation they’re in.” On the opposite hand, after we mess something up, we attribute it to situational aspects fairly than our wrongdoing.
But it isn’t all bad news on this front. Dr. Meir Statman, a behavioral economics expert and professor at Santa Clara University, helps us understand why these inherent biases will be helpful. Confirmation bias, he says, “helps us maintain our existing beliefs and protects us from the psychological distress that comes from constantly challenging our assumptions.” Even the elemental attribution error “can be seen as a way to simplify the complex social world and make it more predictable.” In fact, behavioral economics shouldn’t be just bad Behave.
How can we turn all this into something hopeful and helpful?
- There’s nothing unsuitable with striving for your personal definition of success. A goal-oriented orientation helps us take positive motion.
- We should definitely have a good time after we reach milestones along the best way.
- But we should always not bask in complacency for too long, otherwise we’ll miss the prospect for achievement that far exceeds our wildest dreams.
Oh, and let’s also not forget that striving for an additional word that starts with “S” – MEANING – is usually a way more noble goal than the sort of success we’re after.
