I really enjoyed this talk (embedded below) by Howard Stevenson on success and defining what’s enough in the context of your own work and life. I’ve included my notes below just for reference below. Some portions are paraphrased – any errors in transcription are my own.

Framing the question:
What is success? This is not a new question, it goes back a long time. Is it a state of being? Do you think about it in terms of scores? But it can be difficult to measure, doesn’t fit neatly on any one scale. How do you weight money against fame, against other things? It’s probably uneven, can be unstable. 

One of the problems is that it’s both rational and emotional. There is a rational element in that you can try to compare yourself against others, but there is also an emotional element (it’s like the old saying, you don’t know if you are wealthy until you’re richer than your brother in law).

One way of thinking that leads to a lot of problems is that people often fire the bullet and then draw the circle around it. So, whatever I was good at is what success is. But often, the external measures and internal measures aren’t the same. We’ve all experienced great acclaim for things we weren’t necessarily that proud of and yet feel very proud about things that nobody in the world cares about. So that creates some degree of cognitive dissonance.

Things also change. The world is different now than it was when he was graduating from college and the opportunities his kids have are very different to the opportunities he had. You also change over time – if you still want the same things at 82 that you wanted at 22, your name is Hugh Hefner.

Have to recognize we are all different and a total focus on a single objective often leads to failure – that is, if you focus on one objective, you leave out too many things.

Finally, from his own personal experience, there are things he could have had if he had made different choices. Not that things would have necessarily been better, just different. So seeing people have success that you could have had is like the story of the old boyfriend/girlfriend – you don’t want them but you don’t want anyone else to have them either.

There are three fears about success that his students typically have: one, I won’t be a success. Two, I will be a success, but it won’t be enough (reminds him of the song “Is that all there is?” by Peggy Lee). Third, I will be a success, but I’ll have to sell my soul. There aren’t any Faustian bargains, but you generally sell your soul on the installment plan.

He likes the old Reader’s Digest quote – success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get. He thinks that’s very important to remember because it’s different for everyone and there is a lot of bad advice out there. It’s either the you can have it if you just follow this logic approach (e.g. Stephen Covey) or the stress on perfection in having it all. This is the Cosmo magazine approach – idea that you can be Dr. Ruth in the bedroom and Emeril Lagasse in the kitchen. Unfortunately, most of the success role models we are given in society gloss over the imperfections.

His findings on success:
Laura Nash and him set out to do their own study. Interviewed ~160 people whose success reflected their own values and uniqueness. They found people who felt really good about themselves, but didn’t want to hold themselves up as exemplars of success either. Some of the commonalities they found across the people they interviewed:

They seized opportunities. Not everything was necessarily in their plan, but something came up and they did it. This in turn led to new possibilities.

They avoided the decisions they might later regret. There are different views on whether you can you live life without regret. But in his view it’s because people might be talking about different things. Comes down to consequences vs. process. Bad things might happen but he doesn’t regret them if he made honest decisions that got him to that place. You may wish things worked out slightly differently but that doesn’t mean you regret it.

They enjoyed the here and now – he recalls an interview with Peter Ueberroth, when some ice cream he ordered for the office arrived. He said you’ll probably stay and talk to me, but the ice cream will melt, so let’s have the ice cream now. Served it to all the people in his office and then they went back to the interview. He wasn’t so hung up on who he was that he couldn’t stop and serve the ice cream.

In interviewing people for their study, they asked them to talk about successes in their lives rather than why they were successful. As they looked back on the answers, realized things fell into certain categories:

• Achievement – how you do against other people striving for similar goals (e.g. money, power, fame, athletic skill). This was an important part of success, but not the only thing.
• Significance – what have you done for others that other people care about?
• Happiness – finding the pleasure and joy in your life.
• Legacy – have you done something that others will build upon?

The thing to note is that these are not correlated. You can achieve without being happy (Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway demonstrated that quite admirably). You can be significant and leave a legacy without being recognized (he used the example of his grandfather). Can you be happy without the other things? He says there are a whole bunch of kids living in Aspen whose parents worked hard so that they could be happy. Some of them find it in bottles and drugs. Can you have legacy without any of the others? Karl Marx comes to his mind.

So, you can have one, or you can have some combination of them. But there’s nothing in life that guarantees you get them all. That was the first real surprise: when you talk about success, it divides up into very different things with very different dimensions. It’s hard for one thing to cover them all, and they overlap, so it’s not clean. 

Happiness is about the here and now. You’re not happy in the future, or the past. Legacy is about the future. Not really about you, but how other people recognize you. When you think of achievement, it’s against external goals, but you get to choose the goals which you are striving for. And significance – even Bill Gates can only give ~$10 to every person in the world, so he has to choose to whom he wishes to be significant. If he makes the right choice, it makes a huge difference in those people’s lives. 

The second surprise is they all have different emotional drivers:

• Achievement can be driven by some positive things that are largely internal (recognition, pride and mastery) or by external factors (envy and greed).
• Significance – again, driven by positive things (fairness, generosity, caring) or is this more about power and self-aggrandizement?
• Happiness – contentment and fulfillment is important, but we have people who want to be happy out of gluttony and laziness. The kids in Aspen have interpreted happiness in their own way, but probably not in how their parents meant it for them.
• Legacy – altruism and desire to leave the world a better place. But there are also people who write trusts that they hope will endure 1,000 years. Want to somehow control from the grave the future generations of their family. Reminds him of Tony Manville. His grandfather thought it was good to get married so he put a provision in the will that you got a million dollars when you got married. So Manville got married 17 times. Incentive structures!

How do you achieve success?
Some people say find your passion. The problem is it just doesn’t work. One activity rarely has it all. If you say I’m never happier than when I’m in the office, you got a problem. And if you’re trying to find love at the office, you’ll have a lawsuit.

There are also different constituencies with different judgments. The father who comes home to the kids and says “I’m working so hard, I’m doing it all for you my children.” But the children are probably thinking “bullshit dad, you’re doing it for yourself.” We’ll be happy with the money, but please don’t confuse things. So you need to understand that just one way of doing things won’t work.

Also requires very different skill sets – the skills to be loving and caring are very different than the skills needed for high achievement.

There’s another set of books out of there which say once you’ve achieved enough, you can be significant. You can start giving your money away and once you’re significant enough, you’ll find happiness. And then when you pass beyond, that’s when you leave behind your legacy.

The only trouble is that doesn’t work either. When you move on, what’s enough for now is probably not enough for a lifetime. He has rarely met people who say I’ve made all the money I need, now I’ll get rid of it. There are perhaps a few people. But most people who are interested in achievement want to keep going. You try to maximize and there is always a temptation to go for more. No stopping place if you’re trying to maximize.

There are also continuing emotional needs related to all these dimensions. You don’t give up the need for achievement or the need for loving. Can you wait to be happy? He can’t imagine a life that says I’m going to achieve and when I have achieved enough, then I’ll be happy. But doubtful that your family will wait. The other problem is you don’t know when you’re going to die. So if you wait right until the end, you’re probably going to have missed the opportunity.

Another problem is that it’s often easy to put activities in the wrong domain – put your children in achievement, business activities as happiness, children’s trusts as legacy, visible leadership of charities as significance. Don’t wait to write your ethical will. As his mother said, your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear a word you say. Question he always asks his friends: where do you put your tennis? He can’t put it in his achievement category but can put it in his happiness and significance category.

When you think about the four domains, most normal, well-adjusted people want satisfaction in all these domains. But seeking one hinders the pursuit of others. The time you spend on one thing is probably taking away from doing the other things. Great satisfaction in one area very often can’t make up for the disappointments you have from missing the others.

He doesn’t like the idea of balance – this is a very static concept and implies we can make trade offs that are stable over time. It doesn’t work. It’s more about juggling than balancing. You have to keep your eyes on all the balls. When you look at the process of juggling, when you touch something, you have to give it energy. If you don’t throw it high enough, you won’t have enough time to catch the other balls. You’ve got to give it energy, then release it. You also have to throw each ball thoughtfully and carefully. And you have to practice.

Most importantly, you’ve got to catch the falling ball. One of the things you see in success in life – if people want all four, any ball that they’re losing track of is a problem. Some of the balls, like family, may be made out of glass. Drop it and it may shatter. In his view, the career and happiness balls are more rubber-like. 

There is also a time dimension to all of this depending on if you are young, mid-career or his age. In your early career, you probably don’t think much about legacy. It isn’t a big ball. By the time you reach mid-career, you know your significance, know what makes you happy and how you’re going to achieve. And then legacy starts rearing its head. Start to say what’ll people remember me for? You don’t get to determine it but you get to think about it. And when you get to his age, achievement is pretty much behind you.

The role of enough:
If the first surprise was the complexity of success and the second surprise was the emotional drivers, the third surprise was the role of enough. Enough is a very interesting English word – it has a minimum (have you done enough?) and a maximum (have you done enough?). We often think about it in the context of maximizing, which is the language that the economists give us. But this can be pernicious. A sense of enough is critical to success.

You can think about enough on two counts. One is dimensions. Have to get the 4 dimensions right, but there are also two other subparts. You can’t be a general purpose achiever. Have to choose what and how you’re going to do it. To whom do I wish to be significant? What makes me happy? If you don’t know what makes you happy, you’re probably not going to be happy. So figure out what makes you happy and go do more of it. Then the things that make you unhappy, do less of them.

Then there is the issue of time. What’s enough for today is not enough for this week and is certainly not enough for a lifetime. But if you can set those standards of enough, you actually free yourself up. One reason is that a sense of enough says you’ve made progress. You can put something down with satisfaction. 

Think of the role of understanding that you’ve done enough work for today. What does that mean to you? It means you can stop. It means you can say you’ve done something that was important because you crossed X off my list. It doesn’t mean you’ve done all the work you need to in your life, but you can define what’s enough work for today.

One of the things enough does is helps you see different and new benefits from the next activity. If you can say I’ve done enough of this, what can I get out of that? It can help you make transitions. And yet with a sense of enough that’s time dated, it gives you reasons to come back and do things. So the goal setting process is very critical.

Questions to ask yourself:
Core drivers are values, emotions, the context in which you’re raised – very hard to change and very important to evaluating our own success. Are your emotional drivers positive? People don’t understand when they’re being driven by envy and greed. Achievement – you have to choose your own goals, comparables, to help yourself make good decisions.

Most important thing about enough is it both motivates and rewards. Set the limits which allows for transitions and increases the dimensionality of your life. What do you want your satisfaction to be in each of those domains? Which, if any, are you on the way to missing?