The Biz of Coding

What is Success?

by Ujwal Tickoo on January 9th, 2008

Success is a very complex word. It often conjures images of media, music, movie and business celebrities in our minds or gets associated with heavy sounding titles like CEO, CFO, CTO. The IT world has its own cliched examples of success: Bill Gates of Microsoft, Narayan Murthy of Infosys or Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. Is success a benchmark set up by celebrities or is it defined at an individual level?

The Tech world especially has these supers-sized standards of success – degree from MIT / IIT / Harvard / IIM; C Level job titles; Blockbuster IPOs making stock owners filthy rich; mind boggling startup sellouts that turn the heads of popular news and media channels – all these are so misleading, impersonal, and chance based. How important are these for you? 

Success That Lasts (pdf) is one of the nicest, thoughtful, and most articulate articles I have read in a long time on the subject of Success. Its an article adapted from a book "Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life" by Laura Nash & Howard Stevenson by Harvard Business Review.

I especially liked the way the authors have built a thoughtful framework and redefined common terms as Happiness, Achievement…According to Nash and Stevenson the Four Irreducible components of enduring success are :

1. Happiness: Feelings of pleasure or contentment about your life
2. Achievement: Accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for
3. Significance: The sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about
4. Legacy: A way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to HELP OTHERS find future success

The Authors very well mention "No one person or company can fully embody lasting success for others. Everyone (and every business) has a unique vision of real success, and that notion changes over time…No one, however, has unreserved success, not even the most obvious winner."

Nash and Stevenson point out the painful reality in "running" after socially popular success goalposts:

Pursuing success is like shooting a series of moving targets. Every time you hit one, five more pop up from another direction. Just when we've achieved one goal, we feel pressure to work harder to earn more money, exert more effort, possess more toys. Standards and examples of "making it" constantly shift… 

Other interesting points made by the authors:

• No matter how nobel, one goal can't satisfy all of a person's complex needs and desires.
• Success doesn't have to be seen as a one-dimensional tug-of-war between achievement and happiness.
• Enduring success (means) getting what you want has rewards that are sustainable for you and those you care about. This type of attainment delivers a sense of legitimacy and importance; its satisfactions endure far beyond the momentary rewards of a bonus or a new position.

Referring to her research leading to the book Laura Nash in an interview (pdf) explains the pitfalls of culturally popular benchmarks of celebrity success:

One of the things that struck us was how pervasive this notion of outsized celebrity success is and how people use that to measure themselves. It results in constantly changing measures of success and goal-setting. The environment is literally chaos, and it’s confusing and problematic for those who use those cultural measurements. Measurements of celebrity success will disappoint people in the long run. It stresses self-absorption over social connection,
actually restricts your goals, and offers only a temporary and quite fragile perch upon which to sit. In addition, as we’ve all seen from some spectacular celebrity failures during the last several years, it can be morally hazardous.

Are you finding it hard to "keep-up" with the culturally popular standards of outsized celebrity success or are you busy redefining what success means to you? In this new year are you re-examining what success means to you? Is "fame" related to "success" in any way? What do you think?

POSTED IN: Leadership/Life