Better Ways to Measure Success

Even if you don’t share my love for the band Switchfoot, there is one song you should check out today. “American Dream” is a song about the very things we talk about on this blog and more broadly in the minimalist community: how wrong things go when “success is equated with excess“.

The band goes on to proclaim:

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream

Yesterday, I was once again listening to this song and it got me thinking. It’s true that as a whole — even outside america, our culture measures success in the wrong way, counting the stuff we collect around us: If you drive a fancy car and live in a big house, you are considered a success in life. But what other ways are there to measure success?

1. Wealth as success

This one is just a different version of success as excess, but a significantly better version. In their top 10 bestseller, The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko share their studies on who the real millionaires are, and (actually not so) surprisingly conclude that they are not the ones drowning themselves with stuff but the frugal ones instead.

They don’t measure success by how much stuff they own but by how much they have on their savings accounts.

This beats stuff because it’s more sustainable. When you collect wealth, at its best, it can mean that you are collecting freedom. In the book, it is calculated that the real millionaires could spend years living on their savings without having to work at all. But they rarely do. Collecting wealth and trying to be a millionaire is hard work, so they give up the freedom to save the money they have worked hard to get.

And also, coming back to my worldview, really well described by the Switchfoot song, I’d say this is still “fighting for just me.” No bigger things to live and die for over here.

2. Happiness as success

I don’t believe there is one big meaning for life; to me a meaningful life consists of small, meaningful everyday actions. We will talk more about meanings next week, but for now, I wanted to bring this up to back up the following ideas on measuring success.

First, if there is no all-encompassing meaning for life, maybe happiness could indeed be a decent goal for a good life. If you are happy, you have been successful in life, we would say. And it’s not all bad. After all, helping someone, caring for your family, collecting interesting experiences, learning new skills and being part of your community are all things that can make you happy, just like getting more stuff and working for just money tend to make you miserable.

Happiness is good, but it has one property that makes it a lousy measure for success: it’s a feeling. Some things that make you feel happy today, might not do the same for you tomorrow. You can practice being present and noticing all the things that make you happy, but if you don’t do that, it is easy to fall back to the belief that to be happy you need to spend money, and start “fighting for just me” instead of doing the things that would really make you happy.

3. Change as success

When you take the best from using happiness as a goal for life, you get some good, actionable points:

• Pick small goals that matter to you, and try to make them happen. Not too big, not too small. Something you can handle and that keeps you excited for some amount of time. Don’t take them as THE meaning for life, but meaningful steps you can take in your life. You will be at your happiest while working your way to make the change happen.
• Care for people. Your closest ones as well as the rest of the world in general. It will make you  sad at times, but you will feel alive.

This could be the measure for success we need as a species. It is measurable: the more we change our world to the better, the more successful we are. It doesn’t harm others: Just compare to the status quo. When you are successful measured by consumerist rules, you pollute and create heaps of waste. With this measure, the more successful you are, the better it is for the rest of us!

And, you will be happy as a side product.

4. Just enough success

In the end, one question remains: are we asking the wrong question?

By always talking about success, we are turning life into a competition. It’s a cliché, but we don’t have the time to stop and smell the roses. And what kind of success we are competing for doesn’t change that.

Maybe the right answer could be to have just enough success to feel like you are making a difference. Work on something that matters to you, just so much that you have enough and you can create enough change in the world for one person. Maybe even without setting goals for yourself. Then you can slow down and enjoy your success.

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How do you define success and how much of it is enough for you?