Why Your Input Is More Important than Your Output
Every country has its own version of the list. In Switzerland it’s called the BILANZ 300 List, and it identifies the 300 richest people in Switzerland. In Germany, manager magazin publishes an annual list of the 500 wealthiest Germans. The Sunday Times announces its Rich List in the UK; Challenges publishes an equivalent for France. Forbes puts together a list each year of all the billionaires in the world. The impression they give is always the same: these, then, are the most successful people in the world, all of them businesspeople (or their heirs).
Similar rankings exist for the most powerful CEOs, the most-cited academics, the most-read authors, the highest-paid artists, the most successful musicians, the most expensive sports stars and the highest-earning actors. Every industry has its own version. Yet how successful are these success stories, really? It depends very much on how you define success.
Society can control the way in which individual people spend their time through the way it measures success and bestows prestige. “It is no accident,” writes the American psychology professor Roy Baumeister, “that in small societies struggling for survival, prestige comes with bringing in large amounts of protein (hunting) or defeating the most dangerous enemies (fighting). By the same token, the prestige of motherhood probably rises and falls with the society’s need to increase population, and the prestige of entertainers rises and falls with how much time and money the population can devote to leisure activities.” Modern societies brandish the Forbes lists (as I’ll call these rankings collectively from now on) like bright flags, saying: This is the way!
Why are modern societies trying to steer their sheep toward material success and not, say, toward additional leisure time? Why are there lists of the richest people, but no lists of the most satisfied? Quite simply because economic growth keeps societies together. “The prospect of improvements in living standards, however remote, limits pressure for wealth redistribution,” writes former banker Satyajit Das, before quoting Henry Wallick, a former Governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve: “So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differential tolerable.”
If we don’t want the Forbes lists to drive us crazy, there are two things we’ve got to understand. First, definitions of success are products of their time. A thousand years ago, a Forbes list would have been unimaginable; in another thousand, it will be equally so. Warren Buffett, who along with Bill Gates has topped the Forbes list for years, admits he’d never have made it onto the Stone Age equivalent: “If I’d been born thousands of years ago I’d be some animal’s lunch because I can’t run very fast or climb trees.” Depending on the century in which you were born, society would have extolled some other kind of success—but always doing its best to convince you of its particular definition. Don’t just blindly follow the flags. Wherever they lead, you certainly won’t find the good life.
Material success is also 100 percent a matter of chance. We’re not fond of chance as an explanation, but it’s just a fact. Your genes, your postcode, your intelligence, your willpower—fundamentally there’s nothing you can do about any of it, as we saw in Chapter 7. Obviously, successful businesspeople worked hard and made smart decisions. Yet these factors themselves are the results of their genes, their origins and their environmental opportunities. This is why you should regard the Forbes lists as basically haphazard. And why you should stop idolizing them.
Recently a friend of mine proudly informed me that he’d been invited to dinner with multimillionaire so-and-so. I shrugged. Why be proud? Why so keen to meet a multi-millionaire? The likelihood he’ll be given any money is nil. What matters is whether this person is an interesting conversationalist or not—his wealth is utterly irrelevant.
Let me give you a completely different definition of success, one that’s at least two thousand years old. Success, according to this definition, neither hinges on how society distributes prestige nor suits vulgar rankings. Here it is: true success is inner success. Voilà.
This has nothing to do with incense sticks, self-contemplation or yoga. Striving for inner success is one of the most sensible approaches there is—and one of the roots of Western thought. As we saw in Chapter 8, Greek and Roman philosophers called this type of success ataraxia. Once you’ve attained ataraxia—tranquility of the soul—you’ll be able to maintain your equanimity despite the slings and arrows of fate. To put it another way, to be successful is to be imperturbable, regardless of whether you’re flying high or crash landing.
How can we achieve inner success? By focusing exclusively on the things we can influence and resolutely blocking out everything else. Input, not output. Our input we can control; our output we can’t, because chance keeps sticking its oar in. Money, power and popularity are things over which we have only limited control. Losing them will send you into a tailspin if they’re the focus of your attention. If, however, you’ve trained yourself to be serene, imperturbable and ataraxic, you’ll mostly be happy—no matter what fate throws your way. Simply put, inner success is more stable than the external kind.
John Wooden was far and away the most successful basketball coach in American history. Wooden insisted his players define success in radically different terms: “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Success in this sense isn’t winning titles, collecting medals or being transferred for vast sums of money. It’s an attitude. Ironically, President George W. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the USA’s most prestigious accolade—which Bush presumably found more moving than Wooden did.
Let’s be honest: nobody’s going to strive 100 percent for inner success and pay no heed whatsoever to the external kind. Yet we can edge closer to the ideal of ataraxia through daily practice. Every evening, take stock: When did you fail today? When did you let the day be poisoned by toxic emotions? What things beyond your control did you let upset you? And which mental tools are required for self-improvement? You don’t have to be the richest person in the cemetery—instead, be the most inwardly successful person in the here and now. “Make each day your masterpiece” was what Wooden hammered into his players’ heads. Take his advice. Inner success is never fully attainable, and you’ll have to practice it your whole life long. Nobody is going to do that work for you.
Those seeking external success—wealth, a job as CEO, gold medals or honors—are actually striving for inner success too; they just don’t realize it. A CEO might use his bonus to buy a 200,000-euro IWC Grande Complication watch—maybe because he likes the way it looks on his wrist, but probably so that he’ll be envied. Either way, he wants the IWC because it makes him feel good. Otherwise he wouldn’t buy it.
Whichever way you look at it, the truth is that people desire external gain because it nets them internal gain. The question that suggests itself is obvious: why take the long way round? Just take the direct route.