The Odd Way We Define Success

By Calvin Harris, H.W., M.

Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Gary Merrill in All About Eve (1950)

How often do we hear about successful people, then imagine we fall short by comparison?

In my coaching practice, when Clients ask me how they can become successful? I reach for one of several canned questions to create a dialogue to an answer:

• Short and sweet: “Do you work for yourself?”
• Ambitious: “If you did not have worries about obligations or money what would you do?”
• Mysterious: “Is there a difference in focus in a man of success. Compared to becoming a person of value?” 
• Awkward: "Your focus is it chasing the money or chasing the passion?"

If I’m lucky, the conversation moves the other person to return to their inner dialogue of themselves, to uncover more of the root cause for the question, and to help them frame an answer to their vague subjective question or at least see the underpinning or gauge to their unsatisfied state of being.

Tesla car

I half joking say to them, Oh I can understand your feeling, because on the one hand, I am a successful entrepreneurial mentor, life coach, writer, and more. But on the other hand, I’m none of them, if I used your gauge, because based on your gauge, then shouldn’t a writer have a large following of loyal fans? Shouldn’t a life coach have only high paying clients? Isn’t an entrepreneur supposed to make deals while whipping along in his Tesla through the fashionable sections of SoCal’s Coast Highway?

That’s success, right? And if not, why do you seem to think it is?

Here’s the thing. I’ve noticed that everyone I read, listen to, or follow on social media is unusually accomplished, if only in hype. This is bound to happen. The most prolific people, even if not talented, will get the most attention.

I mean, they’re the best at getting promotion. It’s no surprise they have a large following.

But what then happens to most of us? We hear about these promoted “successful” people, then imagine we fall short by comparison. I call this the Comparing Mind.

How do you respond to others' lives? Have you felt compelled to look over your shoulder and compare yourself to family members, best buds, classmates, neighbors, or someone you've read about, and believe that you have to equal whatever they did in their lives?

The first thing to understand is to know that to some degree the Comparing Mind switches on in all of us. Like it or not, our comparison software will always be running in the background. Now to mediate the absurdity of the Comparing Mind, we want to be mindful and with a lightness of humor, that our lives require a rigorous discernment of which voices to listen to: those coming from our own depths of purpose, or those which are received from the promotional blast of the world around us.

I recall a conversation that took place during a business meeting, that you might find interesting, it was said: In the business world, this phenomenon, of the Comparing Mind doesn’t care about the size of a raise. It only cares if it’s bigger than their co-worker’s raise. For instance, when a CEO’s pay was made public in 1992, it triggered the Comparing Mind in thousands of executives across America. “Wait, she’s making what??” As a result, CEO pay spiraled upwards like a whirlybird.

The takeaway is that the Comparing Mind thinks in terms of relative or equivalent achievement, not in significant or absolute achievement. In other words, if we are not conscious of the other person, we don’t even make the comparison.

Model Jimmy Flint-Smith Photo by Juan Coronado

The point is when confronted with Comparing Mind, it is helpful to put things in perspective. The Comparing Mind is blind. It’s blind to the fact that “successful people” are just people. Beneath all their outward success, they’re as flawed as the rest of us.

Tim Ferriss, for example, author of the “4-hour Workweek”: in 2016 his The Tim Ferriss Show was considered the #1 business podcast on all of iTunes and was ranked #1 out of 300,000+ podcasts, so when you talk about social media success, his name is one that would come to mind.  

Interestingly enough, Tim Ferriss, is purported to have written a revealing blog a few years ago. In the article, Ferriss purportedly wrote that he often struggles to get out of bed in the morning and that he was seeing a therapist. Therefore successful superstar or not, we don’t always have it easy. None of us have it easy all the time.

But, one thing we can do to keep down the stress, is to become conscious of when the Comparing Mind is in action and to develop a sense of examined mindfulness about it.

And when you catch the Comparing Mind doing its thing, remember to flip your focus, stop and check, is your attention on the relative or the significant efforts to your achievement success? It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. It does matter what you are doing, and how you feel about doing it.

The Future - Man Vs Nature? or Man in Nature? Which is It

Is it Man vs Nature? or Man in Nature? Which is it going to be?
Looking for a new business venture? Try looking backwards to create a new business and/or lifestyle model for Man & Nature

 
We have observed that people looking for meaningful lives and purposeful careers go outside the Norm, to come up with new workable goals and to craft improved life and business models in which to work. New combinations of paradigms are thus created and enable life and work to move forward. The “Male On Man” blog is a tool to help refocus and identify such paradigm shifts found in Life, Culture, Science, and Employment offering you helpful points of view that are in the pipeline, that may put you ahead of the curve. 

Check Out an article by Joseph Dussault, staff writer for C.S. Monitor found at -  https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2017/1124/Is-culture-missing-from-conservation-Scientists-take-cues-from-indigenous-peoples?j=17932&sfmc_sub=13792255&l=666_HTM.

PATTERNS OF THOUGHT
We typically think of conservation as removing humans from the ecosystem to return it to its 'natural' state. But the practices of many indigenous cultures offer a different way to view humanity's relationship with the natural world.

Dussault offers us a viable way to shift our thinking when we consider new job creation or lifestyle changes. Dussault shows us where a shift in our thinking regarding concepts such as sustainability, conservation, man’s relationship to nature and culture can be reinvented. He offers notions of scientists who have gone back to investigate and take cues from indigenous peoples.  Follow the link above.  It’s a good read that can lead you to revisions on conclusions about life, conservation, and possible career choices for the future. 
 

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Outside the lines

“Outside the lines” by Calvin Harris

Last month while having coffee & croissants at a Long Beach, CA. dinner, with a few buddies, a discussion came up on finding ways to think beyond the boxes we find ourselves in, and the possible futures those changes could create.  It all started with Tom talking about the 2016 Hybrid and Electric Cars as an example of a change in our shared view of the box called Transportation. Roy pointed out, that this change was due to fuel cost for crude oil, especially in the summer, the cost of fuel goes up as vacationers take to the road and to the so called bi-annual fuel reformulation cost.

Then the conversation really took off with ideas on alternative fuel sources that moved into alternative ways to travel such as an affordable personal aircraft.  We ruminated over how long each of us thought it would take before an idea such as this would get from drawing board to prototype to market. Comments were made that some of these ideas must be in the works already and perhaps have been for decades.  That’s when Roy brought up the quote, and conversation moved around African-American writer and activist Dr. Amos Wilson who is credited with the quote “If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on the profits from that problem, and not who suffers from the problem.”  Comments where all over the board about that quote when we were interrupted by the waiter’s commented to us, that whatever we were discussing must have been good for we were on our 4th cup of coffee, where as we are usually nursing only the one or two cups of the brew.

My thoughts kept returning to Jerry, and what he had said about an article by a new writer for the CSM, Ben Rosen (It’s funny how you can throw down a name or in this case a name of a newspaper - the “Christian Science Monitor” and all ears perk up, LOL, well it is a great paper), anyway Rosen had done this article on a research project at the Airbus facility in Munich, Germany where they are working with green algae slime, to turn it into biofuel that will at some point fuel their commercial airplanes.

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Tom pointed out “that If Companies are doing this, you know it has to do with cost, efficiency.” When Abe chimes in “Or in finding a better environmentally sustainable product than crude.” So as it turns out the Airbus biotechnological researchers have deduced Algae grows faster and produces higher energy yields than other plants. The downside right now is that it is much more expensive to turn into fuel than traditional petroleum byproducts. So we figured that your first flight using algae fuel could take a while. In fact, I was told that in an interview for Reuters International News Agency, that researcher and professor Thomas Brueck, at Munich Technical University, predicted that algal biofuel use could take as long as 35 years to become viable and pass jet fuel requirements. Professor Brueck is quoted as saying “…. We need a combination of different technologies to actually enable crude oil substitution.”

We deduced, in our coffee klatch conversation that new products could come sooner if enough incentives were there.  Of course, we concurred that it would take creative people with the agility and boldness of mind to seize the opportunities to create new inventions and technologies. Who could take ‎ inspiration or ideas from areas that are outside or beyond the boxes we confine ourselves to. Then Roy brought up the need and having in place those people with the understanding of the issues, that have both the agility and diplomacy for rectifying the new directions of technology with the old method of doing things.  We all agreed that people with these abilities need to be developed as drivers to change. It would take people developed with different education, perspective, and skill sets to brings about the transformation of transportation, aviation and shipping industries. Where science will meet art.  Jerry said “One thing that is in place that could move things along, is that there is some sort of regulatory mandate to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Getting closer to that date, could bring many ideas off the drawing boards, to speed up the process of concept to market.  This will take individual’s, in various disciplines to come together committed to research and discovering sustainable solutions that move us forward.

The same could be said of our personal lives. Charles Darwin is reported as saying “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” I chose to call this Blog  Outside the lines, I think because it means to me that we all can become that agility, the agent to conceptualizing problems differently, approaching our life in new and innovative ways and understanding our position in relationship to any particular situation in new ways, perhaps taking action in ways you’d never thought of before. 

This would mean incorporating doing something in a different way than we are used to doing it. It is the need to invite randomness into our lives. Suggestions would be like asking a child for advice. Like working a project from conclusion to its beginning at least in your head. Reading or researching something in an unfamiliar field for the purpose of using it in another area. Drawing a picture or writing something with your left hand on paper.  It can be very revealing as I learned from a class I took from Artist-Instructor-Mentor Heather William of San Diego, CA.  I don’t know a better to say it than what I heard reported to be a quote from Dustin M. Wax, a writer, who wrote “– the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation “that ‘everybody knows’ how to solve.”  All I could say was WOW.  Try some of this and let me know what you think, who knows you could be the next new creator of the future.

Aloha

Calvin