Five For Your Hive: Forget About Success

Forget About Success, Nothing But an Engineer, Struggling Well, A Core of Steel, You May Not Like Who You Become

Forget About Success

American TV stations often begin their interviews with Viktor Frankl by asking him, “Dr. Frankl, your book has become a true bestseller—how do you feel about such success?” Man’s Search For Meaning was written in nine consecutive days fresh out of WWII and has received remarkable stats since its inception: nearly one hundred printings in English, published in twenty-one other languages, and the English editions alone sold more than three million copies. Frankl had none of these in mind, so “it is both strange and remarkable to me that,” Frankl writes, “among some dozens of books I have authored—precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously…did become a success.” The lesson here was a potent one: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender…” Forget about success, focus on the craftsmanship, your purpose here and there, then, you will see it occur afterward. “In the long run,” Frankl writes, “success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

Nothing But an Engineer

To Steve Wozniak—the other Steve who co-founded Apple—all he ever wanted was to be an engineer. At first, he was working at Hewlett-Packard, but starting a company with Jobs would mean that he had to leave the company and focus on being a founder. Wozniak wasn’t open to it. He went home and thought, “Who are you? What do you want out of life?”, Wozniak said in Founders at Work. The answer was simple. “I really wanted a job as an engineer forever at a great company (that was Hewlett-Packard)…I wanted to design computers…show them off…make software. I don’t need a company to do it.” So Wozniak turned down the partnership. His friend, Allen Baum, thought he was crazy, so he called Wozniak. “Look, you can start Apple and go into management and get rich, or you can start Apple and stay an engineer and get rich.” Wozniak’s eyes lit up. “That really freed me up,” Wozniak said, “that was all I need to know, that ok, I’ll start this company and I’ll just be an engineer.” No fancy titles. No big corporate offices. No suits. That wasn’t the motivation he was after. “The hardest thing was,” Wozniak said, “after having big success…”, he pauses for a moment, “see, I didn’t seek the success—I wasn’t like the entrepreneur who wants it.” Wozniak wasn’t thinking about the money. He wasn’t thinking about success. “I wanted to remain the person that I would have been [with or] without Apple,” and that ‘success,’ to him, was simply being “on the bottom of the org chart”—nothing but an engineer who builds.

Struggling Well

In the early years of Ray Dalio’s life, he often looked up to extraordinarily successful people, thinking that they must have been successful because they were extraordinary. “After I got to know such people personally,” Dalio writes in Principles: Life and Work, “I realized all of them—like me, like everyone—make mistakes, struggle with their weakness…[are] no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than the average folks”. What makes the billionaire founder of Bridgewater say that? “While I surpassed my wildest dreams decades ago,” he writes, “I am still struggling today. In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.” Imagine your ultimate goal in life—to excel at a sport, to clinch that business deal, to possess unlimited fame, power, money—imagine achieving it right here, right now. “You’d be happy at first,” Dalio warns, “but not for long…for you would soon find yourself needing something else to struggle for.” And since life is a roller-coaster of happiness and sadness, of successes and failures, “struggling well doesn’t just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad.” It’s not the end goal that matters but the journey that counts. When you fight to survive, when you struggle well enough to improve, the fulfillment that comes with it makes everything seem worthwhile.

A Core of Steel

How would you define a “successful novelist”? Haruki Murakami, having played the game since 1979, gives his honest opinion in Novelist as a Vocation. “Novelist,” he writes, “might be defined as a breed who feels the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.” Writing stories in your bedroom, alone with your thoughts, with a pen and paper and laptop—this sort of thing—is a very “uncool enterprise” which Murakami sees “no chic or anything stylish about it”. And yet the “successful novelist” is one that, despite all the tedious, time-consuming work, chooses to be carried by “a larger, more enduring gift”, that is, “a core of steel”, “an intrinsic, internal drive [that compels] them to write…a tenacious, persevering temperament that equips them to work long and lonely hours.” These are the “successful novelists”, Murakami says, the ones that navigate these stages with a bin full of crushed paper balls, refusing to quit, and the ones who struggle well to invite readers into their world. In time, they’ll find themselves elevated, when success ensue as an unintended side-effect of one’s dedication, and as a by-product of one’s surrender to the craft of writing. In all likelihood, they will become a literary figure whose work transcends time.

You May Not Like Who You Become

“Be careful what you wish for,” Jed Mckenna writes, “not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it. It’s not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.” Success is what we wished for, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But success is not free. There’s a price to pay. One question you should ask yourself is: Do you want to be like the people who you’ve deemed successful? If you’re unsure if you’ll be happier, if you’re unsure if you’ll struggle well, if you’re unsure if you have that core of steel to sustain those long, dreadful hours, then be careful what you wish for, for you may not like who you become. Instead, focus on what you love doing, what you want to do. Then, maybe, success will follow you precisely because you’ve forgotten to think about it.