Can You Be Successful Without Being Secretly Unhappy?
3 lessons from Rosamund Pike’s Marla Grayson.
“It’s lonely at the top.”
I was reading an interview of the Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan where he quoted this line, mentioning how hard one has to work to reach the top, and it’s very lonely there.
This reminded me of the warning my family and teachers have repeated to me over and over again — how success and happiness are mutually exclusive, and you have to give up on one to achieve the earlier.
I also recently watched the movie I Care A Lot based on the recommendation from my friend Buse Umur. The protagonist, Marla Grayson (played by the “Millennial Femme Fatale” Rosamund Pike), is portrayed as highly ambitious, albeit ruthless at times. She stops at nothing to get what she wants and make her dreams come true. The movie chronicles her journey on how she became one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs while starting with no money in her bank account.
It does a brilliant job of portraying the moral dilemma most successful people face: if forced to pick between money and happiness, which one to choose?
This question forced me to look at the psychology behind success and its implications. I found some interesting correlations and lessons that apply…
