The Meaning of Success

What is the meaning of success?

Our culture defines success as having achieved all there is to achieve, as amassing all of the assets one can amass, and as earning as much as is humanly possible during our alotted three score and ten years.

In his book How to Get Rich (Ebury Press, 2007), British entrepreneur Felix Dennis ponders this critical question.  Over four decades, Dennis has established a global magazine empire valued at hundreds of millions of pounds.  Beginning with nothing in the 1960s, he springboarded off a biography of the late kung-fu icon Bruce Lee to aggressively dominate the market for computer magazines before diversifying into other segments of the publishing industry.  His mens’ magazine, Maxim, remains one of the most popular in the world.

While the business grew, Dennis spent years in a self-professed life of debauchery, wasting millions of pounds on wine, women, and drugs.  These days, he oversees his empire from afar, living on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, writing poetry and feeding stray cats.  He is, he says, generally content.

Felix Dennis performs a great service in his “anti self-improvement” book.  He lays the process of getting rich before us, as well as its associated costs, in brutal starkness.  He tells us that we will not become rich if we lose focus, nay, obsessiveness, in our pursuit of success.  He states that there will be significant costs in the journey.  We may lose friendships and will inevitably destroy those relationships we would now claim are of most value to us.  We will inevitably become harder, coarser, and more uncouth.

Will riches make us happy?  Dennis responds resoundingly in the negative,

  I am now very rich.  Am I happy?  No.  Or, at least, only occasionally, when I am walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine.

Further, he argues that the rich are generally an unhappy lot, so exhausted by the demands of others to share their wealth that they become paranoid and insular, turning inwards and finding solace only with those who share their burden, their similarly-wealthy friends.

In spite of these claims we recognise for their inherent truthfulness, many of us remain on the treadmill of success and riches.  Our culture and our mind screams at us that only in achievements and possessions can we find true meaning.  Only in glorifying in our status and our money can we truly self-actualise.

Felix Dennis concludes that it has all been very much a life of chasing the wind.  Too much time is wasted in the chase.  He would gladly give you or I every penny of his wealth if we could give him back his youth and, that rarest of resources, time.   Accordingly, to those who are young, he says, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again.

Instead of engaging in such meaningless, costly pursuits, perhaps a healthier approach is that outlined by Timoth Ferris in his wonderful book, The 4 Hour Workweek (Random, 2007).  Ferris would say that Dennis approached his quest for riches arse-about.  Rather than moving with the vague notion of “getting rich”, potentially creating a never-ending quest as we pursue a rubbery definition of “rich” that ratchets up as our lifestyles demand, we should first begin by defining how much we need each week and month to sustain the lifestyle to which we reasonably aspire. 

Thus, rather than needing $10 or $20 million to afford the lifestyle residence, holiday homes, and first-class travel, we need only enough cash to sustain a comfortable residence, holidays based on rentals and lower-cost destinations, and sufficient funds to buy our way out of the 60 and 80 hour weeks currently killing so many of us, one way or another.

Having a nice lifestyle is not impossible, even when we wish to also maintain our friendships and intimate relationships.  It means, however, that we should redefine success and its fruits in a new way.  To paraphrase Stephen Covey, we must begin our quest with the end in mind.