Excuse the word choice in today’s title while we're in the middle of an actual pandemic, but it was a direct quote from a 2013 TED Talk I watched this week by writer and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, and it captured the topic with so much power yet simplicity at the same time.
Perhaps by now you're familiar with one of my favorite quotes pasted across my email signature, website and more:
"The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind." - David W. Orr.
It was an important mantra for me during a time in which I was considering the next chapter in my career, and it was one of the first times I truly recognized that to be "successful" - a quality and condition of worth we've been taught to chase our whole lives - by itself doesn't necessarily serve anything other than our own ego. As Alok, himself, asserts in his talk: "Success is about self-promotion, not putting change into motion."
Alok's story is one that many of you might find familiar if you went to a "good" school, vied for a job at a "top" company, or find yourself consumed by making your way up a particular promotion cycle. While perhaps you originally took the job or chose your major with the idea of making a difference in mind, the societal standard of success we often measure ourselves against ends up being less about what we actually do in the world, and more about a stamp of approval on who we are. It's another subtle euphemism for "good enough." And so we unconsciously follow certain criteria for or paths to success out of fear of exposing that we're not "good enough," rather out of what we actually believe.
The problem is, our preoccupation with personal success is one of the biggest reasons our world is hurting so deeply today. We work for huge companies with brand names, rather than contributing to and leaning on our local communities. We continue to pump more money into schools with prestigious reputations, rather than focus on expanding education to more people (a really good few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History on this here). Once again in the words of Alok:
"Because the crisis of success has gone unregulated, we find ourselves in an awkward position, celebrating every new success story, while by and large the world continues to get more unequal, more unhealthy, and more unbearable for the majority of people."
So what does it mean to be "successful," not by society, your family, or your peers' standards, but by your own? For some, it's about making a difference. For others it's about being happy. Regardless, the way you define it makes a difference in how you measure the consequences of your actions and choices. For Alok: "Even though I had failed at being an academic, I had succeeded at becoming a better human being."
Which would you prefer?
At the end of the day, Alok says that "the key to changing the world is finding a way to fail to live up to its expectations." Once again, you can watch the full TED Talk here.
