The Perils of Success

It seems self-evident that success is a good thing.

Not many people would advise you to careful about success, or tell you that it can be...dangerous.

Psychologists often talk to people about not taking their failures to heart too much. That is, we help people step out of their perceived failures and understand that the assumptions of personal responsibility that most of us make when it comes to failure, are often incorrect, or at least distorted.

You are not a failure, even if you have failed many times. Or, as a wise person once said, "failure is an event, not a person". What we seem to know about failure is that in many situations our minds are inherently biased to attribute far too much of the failure to our own personal inadequacies, and spend far too little energy appreciating the complex reasons that a person may have failed. (there are for sure exceptions to this, but it doesn't diminish my argument to ignore them for the time being)

Even our definitions of "failure" and "success" are prone to change depending on perspective and time. If you're anything like me, you might look back at your life and see things that seemed like great failures at the time, but now see them as crucial changing points and opportunities that led to all sorts of good things in your life. The same can be true with successes. What seemed like a great accomplishment years ago, may have become significantly less important over the passing years, or even may no longer seem like a success as what you deem important in life also changes. A mentor of mine once advised me that there's no such thing as "winning" and argument with your spouse...that success in being "right" also comes with a cost to the relationship.


More commonly though, success carries with it a particular danger and it has something to do with the reasons we tell ourselves for why we were successful.

In failure or success, what we attribute as the cause of the outcome is absolutely critical. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our failures, we often overlook a host of factors that were beyond our control and end up believing things about ourselves that are untrue. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our successes, we make the same mistake.

Either side of the coin, we feed our false self more incorrect information about who we really are. We begin to take responsibility for things that aren't really our responsibility. While it may be obvious how problematic that is with failure, we're not usually aware of how it works with success.

Success often creates the illusion that we are more than we really are. That we are more in control, more able to influence outcomes, more clever, more skilled, more knowing than we really could ever be. Success creates the expectation that if we are able to have things go our way one time, that we should be able to create the same outcome again in the future.

The trouble is, success, when we attribute it to ourselves, can so easily narrow our understanding of situations that we neglect to notice all the other things that went right, but that were not under our control.

And if we make success a habit, that false self we all have begins to be shaped and molded into a belief that we are the makers of our own destiny. That we are in are charge of our corner of the universe. That we make things happen.

Success breeds the myth of the self-made man/woman.  All of the other people and factors, all of the gifts and sacrifices made by others that contribute to, or even make our success possible are ignored as we begin to believe ourselves to be the authors of our own life stories.

Is it any wonder then, that all of us must learn through suffering? Not just any suffering, but the kind of suffering that mortally wounds our false selves and exposes us to the true vulnerability of being a human in this universe. If we see the impact success has on our egos, it becomes obvious that we can only really learn through failures that destroy the illusions of our past successes and force us to see how we are but one small factor in an enormously complex world.

Suddenly the Sermon on the Mount makes a new kind of sense to me. It is all of us who have been crushed to the point where we recognize our true poverty as humans that are truly "blessed". Suffering brings us the gift of becoming "spiritual zeros", who begin to really find God, and not just some God-type religious product that we were actually using to build our own empires. Maybe Jesus doesn't say "blessed are the successful" because He knows how dangerous success can be. He knows that success will build us a false self that becomes an idol: one that takes the place of God and becomes the source of our worship. But those who have failured, the ones who see their true place in the universe, neither locating themselves as the full source of success or failure, they're the people who see God because they are not putting themselves in His place.

Be wary of success my friends. Remind me of my own words in the future if more success comes my way.