What is Success, Really?

Success means living a happy, meaningful life. What more could anyone want?

What is a life of success for one person could be utter failure for another. However, this does not mean that success is completely relative. Psychologists who study happiness claim that life success and satisfaction boils down to having a happy, meaningful life. They call this accomplishment “well-being.” I think this is what all parents want for their children — and, ultimately, what defines success for all people.

Ultimately, everyone wants to achieve “well-being”

Imagine this Scenario

The phone rings. Someone is asking if you’ll participate in a 1 minute survey. She just wants to know your age, gender and the answer to the following question:

“Rate your life these days, on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life overall and 10 is􏰤 the best possible life overall”

Wow. It’s the ultimate test. I hope you had a cup of coffee!

Situation 1: You are 60 years old. You are an accomplished scientist with an undoubtably successful career. In fact, 3 years ago you actually won a Nobel Prize! But your wife is divorcing you, your kids hate you, your health is terrible — and you are pretty unpleasant to be around. If you are honest with yourself, you just don’t like yourself very much. You answer a 6.

Situation 2: You are 60 years old. You are a moderately successful businessman with 4 kids who love you, a devoted wife, good friends and you feel great. You answer a 9.

Success is hard to measure. It isn’t just about feeling good in the moment, nor does it come from other people’s measures of success. But, how could one consider themselves successful if they are truly unhappy?

The Science of Well-Being

A person’s well-being is typically measured in two different ways: surveys of subjective well-being and surveys of psychological well-being.

Surveys of subjective well-being surveys ask people to rate their life satisfaction overall (like in the question above) and also to answer a few questions about how they’ve been feeling in the past 30 days. Subjective well-being is about how good you feel — and it is typically what we refer to as happiness. That’s why it is also known as “Hedonic” Well-Being.

But since the time of Plato, philosophers have argued that a good life cannot just involve feelings of pleasure — happiness requires memory, values, reasoning, etc.

…if you had no memory you could not even remember that you ever did enjoy pleasure, and no recollection whatever of present pleasure could remain with you; if you had no true opinion you could not think you were enjoying pleasure at the time when you were enjoying it, and if you were without power of calculation you would not be able to calculate that you would enjoy it in the future; your life would not be that of a man, but of a mollusc or some other shell-fish like the oyster. Plato’s Philebus

I think of the expression “happy as a clam” — for who would want to live like a clam, even if they were extremely happy? Similarly, even though neuroscientists could constantly stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers, one would end up completely dysfunctional and living like a vegetable. This suggests that it can’t just be “hedonic happiness” that people wish for themselves — or their children.

Whereas hedonic well-being is about pleasure, Eudaimonic well-being is about meaningfulness. This kind of well-being is measured using surveys of “psychological well-being”, which seek to measure the underlying factors that are believed to produce well-being. Scientists have identified 6 different factors related to well-being: Autonomy, Mastery, Growth, Relatedness, Purpose and Self-Acceptance. Below, I’ve pasted example survey items that people are meant to respond to on a scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”.

• Autonomy “I have confidence in my opinions, even if they are contrary to the general consensus.”
• Environmental Mastery “In general, I feel I am in charge of the situation in which I live.”
• Personal Growth “I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world.”
• Positive Relations with Others “People would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others.”
• Purpose in Life “Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.”
• Self-Acceptance “I like most aspects of my personality.”

Reading these over, it should be unsurprising that people with high levels of eudaimonic/psychological well-being tend to have high levels of hedonic/subjective well-being.

Successful Parenting

So, let’s think about what parents want for their kids. Do they just want them to be happy? Do they just want them to be successful? Personally, I take this research into the nature of well-being to heart: I want to help my children develop the capabilities that will help them achieve success — that is, a happy, meaningful life.

What are those capabilities that help children achieve success? Those capabilities are what psychologists call “intelligence” (which we’ve written more about here). Designing systems to help parents nurture their children’s intelligence is the ultimate goal of LearnWorld.

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If you’d like to read more about the science of well-being, I recommend reading this review article by Deci and Ryan.