Success and Ambition

Success is an interesting thing to think about. Seven Habits of Highly Successful People is a self-help book that starts with an assumption of what constitutes a successful person, and then tries to find out what those people are up to. Emotional Intelligence is a grab bag of traits that largely constitute self-control over one's emotions, and is supposed to be linked to being successful. The things is that I have a problem with the concept of what is thought of as success. A sannyasa is someone who renounces relationships, a career, material worth, and so on, someone who rejects the common definition of success, but who is anyone to say that this dedication for spiritual understanding is a failure? There is a problem with the idea of Emotional Intelligence as well. While I have little doubt that having a high level of Emotional Intelligence produces a high percentage of people with graduate degrees, marriages, high income and so on, I bet it produces a very low level of music makers, dreamers of the dreams.

Perhaps my reservations about success and emotional intelligence derives from my relative low level of conventional success, and my emotional score being twenty or more points lower than my conventional intelligence. People tend enormously to think what they do is the best way of doing things, and I think there's something to that. Emotionally I am very much like my father, and he is a very successful person with the highest level of academic success, a marriage lasting beyond thirty-five years, financial well-off. But he has not been a happy person through most of his life, and his example has been the most important factor in my decisions on my own happiness and ambition.

In my search for what makes people happy that has continued apace over the last few months there are a number of things that I have learned. The first is that people report themselves to be happy, but are largely unaware of what they are talking about. Happiness is essentially thought of as being OK with your life, but in most cases it has nothing to do with transcendant experiences of beauty, with experiences beyond the mundane.
The second is that as a result I have determined myself to be on average substantially happier according to my definition than most people. With myself experiencing what most consider happiness seems inadequate to me, even though I think my experience of those factors to be similar to most people. What I mean is the equivalent of having been raised on fishsticks, still tasting fishsticks in the same way, but having had fresh salmon I know that there are better experiences, I want those better experiences, and the existence of salmon leads me to believe there may be better things to look at than a sitcom.
The third is the emphasis on meaning. That happiness derives not from pleasure but from feeling that your life serves some sort of purpose. While I fundamentally disagree with the premise (the happiest times of my life were purposeless, purposeless is the aim of much of the wisdom of the East) I do think that meaning does contribute to happiness. I think meaning contributes to happiness in that it helps to mitigate the costs of doing things that you dislike, because you are doing some good. It's rather like a spoonful of sugar with your medicine. There is also the momentary high of having done something you think is worthwhile.

From the concept of meaning helping one's happiness I have thought about what would be meaningful in my life beyond the pleasure it gives me. While I struggle to find such a thing, and as a result I have a very low level of conventional ambition, in times of contemplation on the subject I have come up with the following ambition. For me success would be to become the equivalent of the metaphorical sage on the mountaintop, dispensing wisdom to those who wish to seek it out. When I meditate I think of the phrase "Radiating bliss." Success for me, the fulfillment of my primary ambition, would be for me to be someone who by their nature helps those around them lead better lives.

Now the twist. This has been a meandering path to a piece of self-congratulation. Over the previous weekend, while talking to someone going through a hard period in their life, someone I have not known for long, I was told that I was like "The wise, old Indian on the hill." Twice in the last week I have had people who I barely know open their heart up to me and thank for me for my help. I have been a success, and have had an ambition fulfilled. It feels good. But the nature of success and ambition is that the positive feelings quickly fade. What is important is not what you do, but who you are.