The Dark Side Of Success: How It Makes People Trapped In Their Sh*t Even More Arrogant And Miserable
Be careful of success; it has a dark side— Robert Redford
“I’m a trained professional who has risen to the top of his field, and now I’m at a dead end.” -Oz, 36, Head of a large hospital’s emergency room.
“I’ve been doing the same thing for 15 years. I’m successful but feel like there’s nothing left to accomplish.”-Shawn, 34 CEO of Software Company
“My marriage has fallen apart and I find myself looking at other life options.” Harry, 41 , Software Developer
“I’ve achieved all I can achieve in this field but don’t know how to take the next step. It’s as if there is a wall blocking me from moving forward.” “I want to be successful, yet don’t know where success comes from or what it looks like. Is it fame? Money? Power?” “All I want is for someone to show me the way. Someone who knows more than I do about how one becomes successful and can teach me that.” -Patricia, 36 Chiropractor
I want to be happy, but I don’t know what it means. All my life, people have told me that if I worked hard and acquired a lot of money, I’d be successful. But here I am at age 41 still without any closer to success than when I first began. What’s the matter with me? -Micheal, 41, Consultant
“I want my daughter to be successful with her life and know that the only way is through quantum leaps of increased self-esteem. Yet I don’t understand how to show her how to do this.” “All these people talk about is positive self-talk and affirmations, but I’m not sure if that’s enough.”-Camilla, 40 ,Doctor
“I feel like I’ve tried everything to improve my life. I read all the self-help books, went through years of therapy, spent thousands on motivational seminars. And yet nothing seems to work for me, and I still have the same problems every day that keep me from living out my dreams.” -Ron, 31. Music Director
These are real people expressing concerns you’d be likely to hear in any group of 20-somethings or 30-somethings; men who are unhappy with their jobs and their lives yet afraid that if they change anything about them, they’ll lose what little worth they have in the world.
How many times have you felt this way? If you’re like most people, more than once.
So many of us feel this way because we constantly look for the answers to success in all the wrong places. Because someone else has achieved what we want to achieve, we assume they have discovered a process or formula that we need to duplicate and that once we get the recipe down, everything will be fine. But the recipes of others do not necessarily apply to us. What works for some people doesn’t work for others, and what worked for them yesterday may not work again today.
The answer is straightforward: Our relationship with success is unique to each of us. Just as we all have a distinct fingerprint, we each have a special connection with success. And one of the most significant and empowering secrets for discovering real happiness and fulfillment in life is that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” method for attaining it.
To grasp this, let’s first look at the formula that most people use.
The Formula for Traditional Success
What kind of thing do you think of when you think of success? For most people, it has to do with money, fame, or power. We rarely see anyone celebrate their happy hour on TV or read about them in a magazine without these elements playing some role.
Why? Because this formula reflects the core belief of most people, and it’s what I call the “success formula”: Happiness comes from wealth, fame, and power.
This formula has been repeated so often that it sounds like an incontrovertible truth about life, yet it is not at all true in my experience. We assume that if we could make a certain amount of money, be in the spotlight for a while, or have power over others, we would be happier.
The trouble is that this formula doesn’t work. Just ask anyone who’s ever gone into debt to buy something they didn’t even want in the hope it would bring them happiness.
We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.― Dave Ramsey
There are three reasons this formula doesn’t work.
Reason #1: You can never get enough of what you don’t want. We spend our time trying to get things we don’t want in order to make ourselves feel better. Yet, no matter how much money we make, fame we acquire, or power over others we attain, it’s never enough. Why? Because what we are chasing is not what will make us happy in the first place.
Reason #2: You can’t own success. Yet, most people try to buy happiness with money, fame, or power because they think that if they had them, they would be “enough.” But no matter how much we make or acquire, there is always someone with more who could buy or take us down. So much success can never fulfill our most profound need to be enough. We may have the money to buy a lovely house, but if we see one that’s nicer than ours, now ours isn’t good enough, and we want the nicer one instead.
Reason #3: You can’t control your time. As soon as you achieve your goal and get what you’ve been chasing after all this time, you’ll find yourself thinking about the next thing you don’t have yet. And so three weeks later, when you finally get it, it’s not what you wanted anymore because by then, what you thought would make you happy has changed again.
In other words, the “success formula” is a guaranteed pattern of disappointment because it’s trying to get happiness from results that have nothing to do with joy. No amount of money, fame, or power can bring lasting fulfillment because none of those things were ever our real problem in the first place.
The Formula for Authentic Success
At this point, you might be thinking: “I agree with what you’re saying about the traditional formula, but it’s still how I thought myself successful.”
This is also why so many individuals believe they are trapped.– they’ve been chasing after something that doesn’t work and don’t know how else to define success. Fortunately, there is another way. This brings us to my second formula for true success: Happiness emerges from self-awareness, authenticity, and contribution.
If you think about it, this method makes sense. When we are self-aware, we have more control over our lives because the things that cause us to react in irrational ways don’t affect us. If someone cuts you off on the freeway and you get angry, would you still be so upset if they did the same thing one week after you lost your job? Of course not. You’d wave at them with a smile on your face! Those things that used to stress us out stop having power over us when we’re no longer dependent upon them for our happiness. This is why being self-aware is so freeing – it’s what gives us choices in life.
But this kind of happiness still comes with a condition: we must be authentic to who we are. Top athletes can’t fake their way through an Olympic competition, nor can actors convince us that they’re someone else when they’re on the big screen. Likewise, you won’t create lasting fulfillment in your own life if you keep trying to be something or someone you’re not, and it just doesn’t work.
The third part of this formula for authenticity is contribution – giving back to others without wanting anything in return. This is another reason traditional “success formulas” don’t work because it’s usually about taking more than giving (as in getting fame but never feeling famous enough). But when we focus on providing, our happiness is no longer about us – it’s about others. That’s why this kind of contribution brings so much fulfillment with minimal downside.
In sum, true success doesn’t come from external achievements but instead from internal self-awareness and the original contributions you make without expecting anything in return. This isn’t just a theory; these are lessons that I’ve experienced myself and continue to live by today––lessons that had allowed me to be significantly happier than I ever was when I was chasing after fame and fortune (or even power and control). You can try one last time in your own life what most people never get the chance to do… to experience real success in all aspects of your life. And the first step is to understand it.
It is not easy to admit that you are stuck and do not know what to do. But it is how we get unstuck that matters the most. If you feel like nothing is going right for you, remember these five steps. They may help guide your next move:
1) Figure out your belief system
2) Evaluate the situation
3) Add some fun
4) Find a mentor
5) Reach out to friends for support.
You deserve better than this moment or day– so take care of yourself with some self-care!