Metrics of Success

Some midnight thinking

Recently, I’ve been contemplating success. What makes a person successful? How do we quantify success using numbers? For a while, I thought it was your resume.

Simply put, what is the amount of prestige and success? What are the familiar words and fancy numbers you can pack on a single piece of paper such that you strike awe? Then, I began to deconstruct this idea.

Going to a good college certainly means you’re successful. Say you get into Caltech or another of the elite sub-5% acceptance rate schools, surely that must mean you're succeeding, you’ve achieved something 95% of people don't. Well, what happens when you factor in your family income, your race, gender, background, and the fact that you spent two summers interning at your dad's law firm? Say you factor in the fact that there’s a building named after you and your parents both graduated from that school. Is getting in now less impressive, and by extension, are you now less successful? If the former is true, does that mean all success should be quantified in the context of a person’s opportunities? Is everything you do after graduating from that university also less impressive because of the resources available to you? Would it be more impressive if you won the lottery and made a donation so large they let you in on the spot? If success is measured in contrast to those around you, the most successful people would actually be those that drop out of these universities, and spend the rest of their lives surrounded by people who didn’t even get in.

So maybe success can’t be determined by labels or awards… those can always be rigged anyway. What if instead we say that success is defined by how unique you are? Say you love to hike, and you decided you want to dedicate your life to hiking 50 trails that have never been hiked before. They’re not hard to hike… they’re just hard to get to. You put in the effort and hiked all 50 trails, an incredibly unique accomplishment. Are you now more successful? What you didn’t wasn’t particularly hard… it was just very niche. Could we define success as a person’s ability to execute tasks? A direct measure of their productivity? Does this mean an author isn’t successful until they publish their book? No person is successful until a task is complete. If this is true, it feels incredibly discrediting to the process. A great writer is a great writer regardless of their ability to communicate with others…. so defining success simply by one's ability to reach certain societal metrics seems to reduce the definition to fit a very rigid and incredibly socially ambitious type of person.

Maybe we can define success as a person’s ability to persevere. Say instead of hiking 50 new trails; you decide to hike the 50 most difficult trails known to man. It’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done, yet you persevere. You haven’t done anything new. You’re not an original, and you’re still not even close to being one of the best hikers in the world… so now, even though what you’ve done is objectively harder, you don’t seem to be much more of a hiker than the easier (more original) thinker.

So maybe it’s a summation game. We add up different metrics that affect success and divide by some common denominator. If this is the case, there’s some local minimum, some optimal solution, thus implying that success is, in fact, a linear label. That doesn’t seem helpful at all.

Maybe success is philosophical. It’s one’s ability to be loved, feel loved, relax on a Sunday, and sleep worry-free each night. Well, that seems counterintuitive, as then if everyone met the definition of success, the world would stop turning.

Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder, and everyone has their personal definition of success….

This is plausible but not helpful for this mental game, so let’s assume that we reject relativism and enforce universal truths.

Maybe it’s the opposite. Perhaps success can only be determined by raw numbers. How much money you make and how many followers you have, we’ll call it the capitalist viewpoint. If this is the case, maybe the world will implode. Gone is the research, the backs of the giants we’re standing on. Is the implication here that an Instagram model or a low-level CEO is more successful than an anonymous Nobel Prize nominee? Wouldn’t this definition of success discourage experimentation and passion? That can’t be right, either.

So, if anyone has a definition of success, I’d love to read it in the comments.