Tough one to skate, because it’s completely tied to your family, your upbringing, your belief structure, and your values. But let’s try.
Bye bye Bezos
Over the weekend, the greatest entrepreneur of the disruption age, Mr. Jeffrey Bezos — to quote Bo Burnham, “You’ve made it!” — left his perch as CEO of Amazon, which he had been since 1994. He’s not leaving Amazon, no. He will be the Executive Chairman. And, if we’re being honest, he probably left the day-to-day somewhere around 2014, but it’s a better narrative that he’s “leaving” now. As a result, we got some hustle porn-ish tweets about Jeff, including this sequence.
What’s happening in these tweets is that Amazon was trying to launch Kindle, which was its first hardware product, and this guy Dan tells him “We probably need to acquire this company in Paris.” They were on a private plane to Chicago, and Bezos is like “Turn this bitch around, we going to Paris to acquire this company!” They ultimately did not go to Paris, although later they acquired that company.
It’s easy to read these tweets and basically be like “If I want to be very successful, I need to be willing to change a plane’s course from Chicago to Paris instantly.” We see this in many other supposed “leadership” narratives, and of course hustle porn: If you want to be successful, you basically need to beat yourself into an emotional and physical coma every week, but keep smiling as you do so. And never stop working. Never.
But a lot of that is bullshit
Much of it is, actually. To wit:
- We know that most human beings aren’t very productive after 54 hours/work per week.
- We know that a lot of hustle discussions are trite bullshit.
- We know that people regularly confuse “busy” and “productive,” and tend to focus on “busy” often because (a) it’s equivalent to a drug and (b) it’s a badge of honor in many organizations.
- We know there’s a difference between “achievement” and “fulfillment.” Individualized societies focus on the former, and collective societies often focus on the latter, although that’s a bit generic and not always accurate.
- We know that loneliness is spiking, and what people crave more of is relationships and friendships, and that tracks with people in hospice too. COVID shook a lot of that up, too. It made us focus more on our people, or so I’d like to believe. (Not always true.)
So what is success, then?
It varies by person, and it’s deeply tied to belief structure, values, geography, etc. No easy or single answer.
I would say that success has to be through the prism of relationships. I’m not always good at relationships, romantically or otherwise, and I struggle in friendships enough that I actively write articles about expectations of friendship.
But still, we’re social animals, and we gain energy from people (even introverts). Conversely, a nice car, a big house, a big bank account? All great achievements, no question. Can you take ’em with you? No. Ever see a Brinks behind a Hearse? I haven’t seen it often. I think ancient Egypt did it, but that was a long goddamn time ago. Different value structures too.
I always feel like the definition of success should be inherently personal (Tier 1), but be focused on relationships, friendships, and family (Tier 2) as opposed to material achievements. That definitely does not track with a lot of how the USA thinks about success, but that’d be my call on it.
Sometimes I think one of the biggest challenges of human existence — sorry to get deep — is that you often need to focus on these specific goals and tasks in the moment (“get this done,” “make enough to fix your roof”), even though a lot of times, those tasks and goals end up pulling you away from what really should matter.
