Kahran and Divya break down what it means to be successful -- and to have been successful and no longer be so. When do our cultural definitions permeate our feelings about successful? And when do they preclude achievement in success? What does it mean to have achievement in success? This second episode in the series about success is scintillating, provocative and guaranteed to leave your head scratching.
When you haven't had a good definition for the outcome you're trying to achieve, it's hard to feel successful. Feeling successful and feeling content are different things.
The cultural narrative is that you can't be content if you're successful, because contentment will stop you from striving. That's definitely a narrative, but I'm not sure it's true.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
I'm thinking. Welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. Today Kahran and I continue our foray into what is success, what makes people feel successful, what makes us feel successful, and other questions of similar nature. We hope you enjoy.
The thing I was thinking about was that when you haven't had a good definition for the outcome you're trying to achieve, it's hard to feel successful. Because I think there's a different thing between feeling successful and feeling content. Correct. I qualitatively know that there is a difference, but how do you articulate it?
So yesterday, as I was mentioning before we started recording, Gorev and I are doing this couple's learning how to do massage. And at the beginning, the person who was instructing, he had us all sit down and remind everyone our names, our pronouns. And he was also asking, how do you feel and maybe just share one feeling that you have
coming into the class this week? Could be carried over from last week, could be something you learned, but anything. And I was thinking about, and I was like, I feel kind of content. He was giving these examples. Maybe you feel excited, maybe you feel nervous, maybe you feel like different emotions.
And I was just like, oh, I feel kind of like content with the choices that have brought me here. Right? Like it's a Thursday, 7 30. I like managed to eat some food before, so I'm not feeling very hungry.
I was like, oh, I'm a little bit thirsty. So like, you know, I feel a little bit like I feel at ease both like physically in my myself and then also like kind of in my mind also, which I think is very different than feeling successful. Right?
Like you're like, oh, I'm okay with what's happening. This is a fine situation. But do you feel like one forbids the other? Because I feel like oftentimes the cultural narrative is that like you can't be content if you're successful.
Like if you're trying to be successful, because like contentment is going to stop you from being successful. And vice versa, like if you're successful, it will not achieve contentment because you're going to keep striving towards something. Yeah, that's definitely a narrative I feel I've heard.
It's like, right, though, like you have to be young and be hungry in order to, right? Like this maximum that goes around, I think VC circles is where it's originally. I guess it depends on what your motivation is, right? If you're someone who's motivated by injustice or motivated by some type of pursuit that is counterindicated with contentness, right?
But I think it's something that we talked about in earlier seasons where it's like, is this a good fire or bad fire? How did we talk about this? Do you remember this? Yeah, clean fuel and dirty fuel.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Remind us just both me and our listeners. Like in the sense that you can be driven by multiple emotions and a dirty fuel is something like, oh, I'm going to prove them wrong. I will show everyone who never believed in me how I'm going to go or like, you know,
N.V. are honestly like a lot of other extrinsic motivators like social acceptance and stuff like that. They often tend to be dirty fuels and like using the term dirty fuel versus clean fuel is like, oh, dirty fuel is going to give out toxic flames. And like when you burn it, you're going to inhale those toxic flames and they're going
to do something bad to you in the long run, right? And it's a little bit like if you're motivated by N.V. You can arrive at the things that you want to arrive at, but like, are you wanting the right things is a very difficult balance to strike there. Same with like, you know, somebody doing things out of obligation, not duty, not care.
Like you can do the same actions with like, you know, different reasoning behind it. And I think like the logic of clean fuel versus dirty fuel is like the reasoning matters. Like there are people who take care of their children because like they feel obligated to and there are people who take care of their children because they care for the children. And as those children grow up, you can see the difference in how those kids interface
with life. Yeah. So that would be clean fuel versus dirty fuel. Interesting. We went into a little bit of that as the evening went on and we were learning this
massage because he was saying, you know, don't give anything that you can't give with a full heart. So, you know, someone is asking, you know, to touch your hand in a way that you're not comfortable with and you're only doing this work with your partner, right? Is it with your husband in my case?
But, you know, it's still big emphasis on articulate articulate for yourself, articulate for for the situation. But but stuff that you won't kind of have those kind of carryovers, I think of resentment that can start to arrive where you feel like you're doing something for someone and they don't really necessarily even know.
Um, yeah. So I feel like if you if you do start to go down those paths also, it can be hard to stop, right? If you've been and be motivated, then when do you achieve your outcome? And so then it kind of becomes your success is dependent on a relative positioning, right?
Because that's what you've been chasing. You've been chasing a relative positioning. I don't know if that's true for all of the kind of dirty fuels as we were as we were naming them just now. I mean, like, there is different kinds of and I wonder if like that is why
discontent almost becomes a necessary source of the drive that will get you to success. Because it puts you onto the treadmill at a high speed. Then the question is, like, do you ever get off? Yeah.
Yeah. Interesting. But do we feel like we know people, maybe we can find some this season, but we know people who have found success without kind of being motivated in that way. And first of all, maybe we can like articulate what is that way really, right?
So we're saying it's like, you know, you're motivated by envy or motivated by feeling a retribution, comparison or feeling of like, deservedness or a feeling of should, I would say, like, I should do this or I should get this. And the should can come from many different ways, like, because I deserve it or because if other people are getting it, then I should also get it or because it
should be easy for me to get it. So I should get it. Like, you know, any sort of almost like compulsion driven pursuit of success. And now, as I say, another sort of factor comes in my mind in creative careers. You often hear like, even in the artist, she talks about, like, you know, focusing
on the craft, just the doing and not worrying about the outcome. And like, there is success in the doing, like she almost redefines success as not the outcome or the output of what you're making, but rather that you are making and you're showing up every day and that is success. Because in a weird way, you can define success for yourself.
Yeah, I think this is something I was talking about last week a little bit, but I think that part of my ever evolving definition, I think I've learned now a little bit apart from you. But when I think back on my week, how many of those hours were spent in the pursuit of things that I'm excited that they were spent about, right?
Like that are in alignment with where I'm trying to take myself. Because then that's saying, like, you know, I'm being able to both have the notion of where I'm trying to grow, but also being able to put the hours in to try and move myself in that direction. And I think if you can shift to thinking about how you're spending your time
versus the outcome of that, you will eventually get to this point where you are going to, because putting time into something is how we get there, right? Like that is eventually how you're going to make the achievements that you're looking for. But that sounds like a very holistic way of looking at. So you're almost thinking about a successful day or a successful week
rather than I am successful at XYZ. You know what I mean? See, when you originally said it, I thought you were saying kind of I am successful in this moment. So looking and almost taking a judgment of where you are, like a snapshot.
And then I was saying, you know, as I look back at something, right? Like if I had played the video of that, would I deem that as a successful period? But now you're actually asking about it almost from a trait point of view, which is saying now as I look at my ability to execute this skill, do I feel successful in that?
Is that am I saying that correct? No, more like you could articulate it like that. I was just thinking about like so you can have a successful week when you have balanced being like, you know, all the things that matter to you. So maybe it is spending time with your friends, maybe it's spending time in work,
maybe it's spending time writing poetry, maybe it's spending time with your body doing something that is new or like, you know, engaging with the arts, like whatever things that are valuable to you, you've spent some time doing those things. Does consistently doing that make you feel like a successful writer and a successful partner? Or is there something else?
So like, you know, it's almost like there is a, what is a successful week versus what makes a successful partner or what makes a successful creator? Like, are those different? What you just said just now really struck me. I think as some of our listeners know, I'm in the middle of doing an MFA and we
have readings every week. And one of the readings was by this guy named Samuel Delaney, who is mostly a science fiction writer, but he's also wrote nonfiction. And the way he talks about his own writing is he's like, I wanted to write the books I wanted there to be.
And that just meant having a dosage of sexuality and science fictionists that just didn't exist. Anyway, so this essay we read ends with this, this little paragraph that I'm going to read to you guys. I no longer write novels or stories with complex structures because between my
retirement in spring of 2015 and today, I have observed the deterioration in my own mental processes, which makes it all but impossible for me to read or write complex works of fiction and nonfiction, other than very short essays, the length of a Facebook post, even these require a great deal of editorial revision, sometimes with the help of an outside reader.
This also explains the form of these notes. It is not necessarily unpleasant or pleasant. It is simply a fact. And as part of the transition I'm trying to make between someone who writes and someone who has written.
Wow. So this really struck me. Because I was like, damn. That's just a place to end up. And I guess as some of our listeners might know, I also, one of my very good
friends in Bangor passed away very unexpected with this week. And it was just interesting to kind of think about that, right? Like at one hand you can kind of, you know, die at 37 and still have all of your talents with you and really be producing work that is kind of the peak of your ability.
And on the other side, it's like you can live long enough that you see your ability to even create is no longer where it once was. And you look and you're saying, I can't create the works that I once created. That ability is no longer there. So then it's just, it's such an interesting thing when you think about
that and the question you had framed, right? Where it's like, so success is really, I don't know, I feel like I come back to the framing I almost had where it's like, it is a period, right? It's saying, do I look back at that period and say, was I successful? Or do I feel successful with the work that I did?
But it's easy for that to become a question of, do I feel successful with the outcome? Right. Because whenever you're looking back on it, you're going to be biased towards what is the thing that happened?
I was telling a different friend of mine who really unfortunately had a terrible kind of ending to a career he was having at an organization. And I was saying to him that, you know, you had a great run there, even though this was like a very difficult end. And so easy for us to get biased, right?
You know, even as a, you know, I were talking about it, I know, because the same thing happened to me when I was running with the next. I had a great time running the company, right? I think I did a lot of initiatives I was very proud of. I hired a lot of people.
We put great, just stuff out there, stuff that we could be proud of. But because of how it ended, it's so hard for me to look back at it and say, oh, that was a successful period. So I don't know if I answered your question. I can answer the roundabout question.
I was thinking about a lot of things because it almost feels like how you were describing it. Success is a retrospective emotion. Like it's a little bit like nostalgia. You can't feel nostalgia in the present about the things that are happening right now.
Because the same category of things as like anything that is contingent upon the past or the future, like you can't ruminate in the now. You can't be anxious in the now. You have to be anxious about the future and you have to ruminate about the past. So sometimes I found, and then maybe this is just particular to me, but I would
feel like wistful during events that I had planned. And I realized, actually, I realized now as I'm articulating this, I think for a long time it was like you're almost feeling nostalgic for the event you're at was how I thought about it. Now I actually think because I really enjoy the planning process, I think actually what may have been happening was right.
I went to your at the event. You can feel nostalgic for the process that led you there, which I think I was misinterpreting the emotion. Okay, fine. I agree with you.
Carry on. Carry on. So like, you know, it's almost like, because I don't know if you have experienced it, but like I feel like there is a certain sense of peace and calm when I'm drawing, right? Like when pencil is on the paper or when brushes on the canvas, like there's
just a sense of calm and I love doing it and I don't want to stop doing it. And there is almost like this contentment in the process, not contentment in where I'm at in the moment of time, but like where I know the movement of my hand is taking me. I want to keep doing it, right?
And in some ways I feel very content and successful both at the same time in that moment, but I don't think it's the same flavor of success as what I feel when I'm finished with something and I see the finished thing. I wonder if I give you a slightly different framing house. I'll feel what I was trying.
So I wonder if one is looking and saying, okay, I'm being able to spend time in the way that I want to, that makes me feel successful, right? Like I have the agency, I have the capability, I have capital and the expenditures, right? And there's sufficient stability in the situation I'm in. I'm being able to have all the things aligned that I'm able to spend the time and I
want in the way I want to. And that feels very successful to me. And because, you know, as we've talked about previously, but right, there's something kind of almost inherently selfish in the act of creating art. So it is kind of a thing that one is doing for themselves, maybe, right?
And then I wonder if the other side of it is looking and saying, look at this, right? It's like the feeling that I might have when I look at like maybe like some poetry I've written and I've just been like, damn, right? Like those are, like I love the poeticness of it, the amount of meaning that is captured in just a few lines, where it's like, it's an acknowledgement
of the years you've spent building the skill and the way you've lived life and your ability to kind of coalesce that into a single piece of creation. So you look at that and you're like, damn, you know, I do feel successful. It's like, even, you know, I made this book about my wedding that's sliding around my house right now.
And when I flipped through it, I'm like, yeah, you know, both the experience that I think was created and then even just like this book is really lovely, right? And it makes me feel happy to think that I can create things like this that have these tangible values. So it makes me feel successful.
Like it almost sounds like one is legacy oriented success, like I left something, you know, I made a mark. But I think that's my flavor, because that's for me, what my particular flavor of success I think is a little bit legacy oriented. But I wonder if like, if you took that framing without that particular flavor,
you know, if it might feel resonant to you, because I don't think you're as legacy oriented as I am. Yeah, I'm not like, maybe I am like 5%, 10%, but yeah, it's very negligible. You know, there's like, I've been working also with this movie team and like, you know, the Sivya FX team.
So the movie won best film at Leeds and like the reviews are coming in and they're so blowing. And maybe like, you know, when you're working on something for more than a year, you start becoming a little numb to the emotional affect of it all. But apparently like people are crying and people are laughing.
And I don't know, I've always found something really powerful in art that can make you cry and laugh both. Sometimes getting laughs is cheap and sometimes getting a cry is cheap. But getting both really is very hard. You can't do it in a cheap way.
Right. It's interesting scene with like, you know, working with Varun from ShiftShifter, that's the name of the VFX team. And like, you know, just seeing how productive creatively it has been. And we have not really collaborated on hard creative skills.
This is probably the first time I'm working with a team that is all visual artists and I'm probably the lowest caliber visual artist in a certain sense in terms of polish and what the output would be. And this is interesting because I wouldn't think of like something that I thought was so core to my identity could be removed and I would still feel
successful in that space. Like I feel successful about the work that I'm doing with the team. That's interesting. I wonder, I think as a PM, you faced that a little earlier on, right? Because there's so many things that I did initially that then I met people
who did better than me. But I guess they weren't core to my skill set, right? Like always kind of core to my skill set was understanding and breaking down problems in a way that was then able to be built and put with a timeline. Yeah, like I'm doing something very, very not my skill set for the team.
And like I still see the value that I'm bringing because like the team had such a gap in where I am filling the gap that is just very visible. It's been interesting because I almost always thought earlier that like a success is in part validation of your identity and your self concept. And so just that piece is so interesting, especially because like even abstract
things like, you know, oh, I'm a really smart person and like something that validates that makes you feel successful. So this reminded me of a time that I did a similar project for this, which was the first time I really did a marketing project, which was for a client in London. And our company had been hired to do the development and then the marketing,
but a different company was doing design. And it was really interesting because there were a lot of choices made in the like actual way the product was being developed that I didn't necessarily agree with. And I remember I once picked this one battle about the analytics because I was like, this directly impacts me because I need to be able to market this
product. And then if you're putting in these analytics in like a totally random way, it's not going to be able for me to understand like people's journey through the product and what parts are actually being successful. Because I had this hypothesis that it was a product that you only could use once you made a booking so that if we went out and did this like big advertising
campaigns for it, we would need to have a workflow for people who had not yet made a booking because you would get all these people downloading the app that couldn't actually use it because they didn't have a preexisting booking. Anyway, I still remember some of these battles. And it was just interesting to see because I definitely understood more
about app store optimization and thinking about how do you make an app successful than other people did on that team. So I was adding all this value, but it wasn't value that I was core to what I had built my skills around. It was more dependent on the fact that I was good at coming up to speed on things and I was good at figuring out how do you apply
things in like an internet first world, right? So, you know, what are the kind of lessons that we've learned from making things findable on the internet and how do we now apply that to app stores? It's a new paradigm for kind of the same. I'm sorry, it's the same paradigm in a new arena. Excuse me. I confused my metaphors for a second.
Yeah. I also think that this is a very separate point, but like, I think that is a very specific skill, right? Being able to learn quickly. Not just that, like transference. So like, you know, something in one domain and then like being able to apply it somewhere else.
Like a lot of times people who are really fast at picking up languages are really good at that. They like very quickly build their model of a new language based on a previous language. And it doesn't feel like learning a completely new track, right? So like that's a very, very primes you for success. Kind of a skill set because which means that like every time you learn
something new, it exponentially elevates your ability to learn new things. Because just using combinatorial math, you can see like, if you know, two things, four is easy, but three things, nine is certainly easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It also, I guess, depends on how far apart they are, right? So if you can kind of build things that are a little further apart, you really
be able to start to see. I actually did find that was true. I mean, I felt like you were talking about me. Yes. After I went to culinary school, I definitely felt like I had learned a whole set of things that I was able to apply to other parts of my work. But anyway, what I was getting at though, was that as I think about that period,
I do feel like that was a very successful period for me. And I think part of it was that I grew in a lot of ways that I hadn't thought were possible, right? I kind of ran up against my limits of like what I was doing. Like I was 25 or so, right? And I was like managing this kind of relatively large client engagement. I think it was like 30 or 40,000 pounds a month.
And then I was also just like flying to London by myself every three weeks, which was just like, I never, I hadn't really had those experiences before. So there was like both life experiences and then also like kind of a management of a project type experiences, as well as it being a new domain that I was kind of coming up to speed to. So there's a lot of learnings that were happening.
And then the project was going relatively well, right? We sold some extension. So I was also getting feedback that I was doing a really great job on it, which also helps you feel successful. And then I think one of the things that really stayed with me is the like website that we built for them to advertise the app stayed up for like seven years.
It was bizarre, right? But it was just like they kept using it. And because it was just it was really well done, right? Like it kept, I think they made some changes as the product changes, but it just it didn't feel old in the way that most things feel old after a few years. Right. So it's just nice to see that.
Like you were able to future proof, whatever you had created. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like a lot of that work was really more my thinking or the value I brought to the project, because I think there was a really great visual designer, and then we had a product owner who kind of had a sense of what was wanted, but then actually translating that into something that was able to kind of
be successful and be successful thinking ahead of what was going to come. It's really cool. So then I feel like as I think about that, you know, do I have other projects that I remember that people like felt I did great work on? Yes. But I think the components I didn't have oftentimes outside of that particular one were ones where I looked back and felt like that work was really great.
And I liked seeing that work and then also feeling like I had learned a lot from that experience. Yes. When you were describing it, it really felt like a very growth project for you. Like just personally, you grew a lot. Right. So a question I have is like, do you feel like growth always feels like success, because that would just make me think like it's a little bit like coded
in our DNA, like every single celled organism also wants to keep growing, growing, growing, growing, growing, growing, right? Like this, like from the beginning of life, which was three billion years ago or something like that, constant growth at some level, it just feels so right. Like nothing tastes like growth. A friend had recently asked me if I feel like time passes differently as you grow
older, because just fewer things happen. And I realized like as she was talking that I think I've done like quite a bit this year. And I think quote unquote, I grew a lot and I don't think the year like I know we are in November, but it doesn't feel like, oh, we are already in November. I'm like, yeah, like a lot happened. Of course, we are towards the end of the year. Like it feels very like I didn't
feel like it just flew by. And also part of it is like I was making those everyday posts and it forced me to sort of like, you know, weirdly slow down. Going back to like what you earlier said, I really feel like looking back, I'm like, ah, this was a successful year. Like that period of time, just looking back. And I wonder how much of that is just like how even you were describing
their two components, right? One is you really felt a lot of growth. And then you were able to be present with all of that growth. Like you were able to see that like, oh, I did this and I'm here and like, you know, I'm traveling to the client location. I'm talking to these people. I'm able to motivate them. I'm able to bring this insight.
And like you were able to almost like articulate to your mind where all of the effort that you are doing is going. Something a therapist of mine had told me burnout is not due to overwork. Burnout is when the equation of work and how much value you are getting out of work gets destroyed. So like overwork wouldn't hurt you.
But if you feel like this means nothing, it would hurt you. I'm sure for you traveling every week wasn't or every month wasn't easy. It's an international flight and like, you know, you're going around, but you felt like, oh, this is fun. And this means something to me. Yeah, I made it really fun.
This was the right thing to break me out of my long deep thoughts. Because at the time my ex was first, he was in Boston when I had started the project and then he was in just outside of Philadelphia when the next school year started. And so the company would pay for me to fly directs. So it was almost always cheaper to fly with a stop.
So I would fly wherever he was, Boston or Philadelphia for the weekend and then carry on. And then also, right, there was all these websites for figuring out what seat to pack so that I'd figure out like which seat would have like, you know, a little bit more leg room. And I got really good at it because there's so many flights a day between something like Philadelphia and London or even
Boston and London. So yeah. And then that was eventually how I, you know, I made lots of statuses on airlines. And then I was like, it was just a good time. I had a great time. I think also I was able to do it with a lot of freedom in my ability to kind of set my schedule and figure out like what was working. And that made it gave me these other returns, you know, like if I had
felt like otherwise, you know, I always had to travel with my boss or something. And you know, I was really on someone else's schedule. It would have felt really different. Did you also really like the people that you were working with? Because like you already have two out of the three things that people would say are
required for like intrinsic motivation. So you have a sense of mastery, right? Like you feel like you're improving, you're growing. You have a sense of agency because you're like, I can control my time. How I'm doing things. So if you really liked the people, no wonder you love that project. People were okay. And for me, I tend to be biased more to products where I
really like the people. And this was a little bit tough because initially I had someone I really liked working with in India, but she got moved off to a different project. And then I had people who I was having a little bit of trouble working with. And also at some point we, the team got split. So there were some people in Russia because we had been acquired and then some people
in India. And then my own boss was in London, the one who ran the London office was a bit much. He was, he's a great guy, but he, it was just, we had like a drinking culture at the time that was just like a lot where I think it was pretty common in the UK, but we would all go to the pub so much. And it was like, oh, you're going to have like, you know, two large whiskies and then have
some snacks and then head home. It was, it was just a heavy environment all around. It wasn't necessarily the most successful. That could have made it better. Like if the work wasn't that heavy. Yeah. If I was working with some of the people I worked with later, like when I worked with Shweta, it was amazing. Or Sahil, or working even with my sister was
very fun. But anyway, no, I was thinking about what you were saying for a long time, which was around this notion that we're always striving for growth. And it's interesting because there is a lot of truth, I think, in it. When you think about people in a lot of different ways, they are kind of, you know, you're looking for growth by having progeny, or you're looking for personal growth,
you're looking for growth by in reaching enlightenment, or you're looking for growth and, you know, seeing your skills and putting your skills to the max. And then I do think that, you know, even the way that we think about a lot of our punishments, it's like taking away people's ability for growth, right? Like in historic times, you would like be permanently by like marring them, right? Or
maiming someone. But like now in more modern times, we take away like agency for growth, right? And saying that, you know, your ability to use will be constrained, you can grow maybe only in these ways, if at all. So I don't know. I also do think that there is a sense of like exhibiting mastery. And I think that's more something I've met with people who I've met who are more older and
kind of reaching like retirement ages or beyond that, where they're kind of content in kind of sharing the knowledge they've accumulated. And that even seems to be like a waning desire. Like there's a point in like your, I don't know, 50s, 60s, right? Where you really are trying to share this accumulated knowledge. And then there seems to be like a waning desire from for in a lot
of people at least, to continue to share knowledge. If it happens, it happens, but not with a big willingness to put a lot of work in to make it happen. But I do think that there's this sense of like, yeah, you know, I know how to paint or I know how to create at a certain level. And I want to do is create at that level. It's not necessarily about growing more, but it's about the process of creation
and the process of doing the thing that you love to do. And then if the growth happens, maybe ancillary, but I don't think it becomes as much of a driving motivator. It's not like you're going to look at and say I was successful because, you know, I grew in this in my technique. But there is always growth there, right? Like every time you make something,
you are growing your body of work. Well, what if you destroy it after you make it? Then is it still growing your body of work? Then you should go to a therapist. No, but it is. It still is because like once you have created, you have created, you know, you have created, even if you burn it in the sense that we all as creators
would have the sense of I have made this many things, right? Like sure, you can grow your skill, but even at your current skill, if you keep building things, you are building up like what you can do. Well, when I first was introducing this topic, you know, some minutes ago, I was trying to go in one direction, which now I'll just share with you and then we
can figure out if we've arrived there or not. But what I was thinking about was that in order to look at a period and know whether or not you felt successful, you need to have some defined objective from it. Right? Because otherwise it's very hard. Like if you were saying like what I was doing was like you were just going to be cool with whatever for that period. It's hard to be like,
say whether or not that was successful because you were like, ah, you were going along with whatever, right? And where you haven't really paused to, and I would look at something like that and say, oh, you know, when I'm cool with whatever, I haven't paused to really ask myself, what do I really want? So I think that there may be this contention to be made that success comes from looking at a period
and saying, okay, what was the work that was put in? And then what were the outcomes? Or what was the way I felt from the work that the, what they were gave to me? And I think this is some ways is what you were saying a few minutes ago, right? Where it's saying, how much effort did I need to put into that? How did you say it? Like how much work did it take for me to get the outcome that I was trying to get? I'm not saying this the way you said it.
About the burnout thing. Yeah. Like what you're putting in is not necessarily what you're getting out and like, you want to have a balance of like the value you are deriving from the work that you're doing. Correct. That was it. Thank you. Yeah. So there's this correlation between how you feel about it, how difficult it was for you, how much work you had to put into it, and then how much joy you feel about that experience. And the way I was saying it to you, I think last week,
and I've been kind of mulling it over was that success comes out of these moments where you did work. And if you take away that quantum from that quantum of work or quantum of energy you put in, you take away the parts that you feel like you were doing just out of joy. If there's still stuff there that you feel like it's your positive about that, then you're going to feel successful and about this experience. So now as I think about that with this lens of creation, as we were just
talking about creation, I don't know, I mean, maybe I have to put it as a question to you. How much do you feel still kind of, is there a joy in that process of all the time? And is it a joy in spending the time or is there a joy in the outcome? Or is that indistinguishable? In both? No, it's distinguishable, but it's in both. I also don't, by the way, I do disagree with the notion of success is if you remove joy from the work that you have done. Because I think that
at least to me, my internal barometer of success goes higher the more joy I'm getting out of work and how I'm spending my time. If my life starts reducing in the amount of joy it has, then I start feeling not successful. So there is like, you feel unsuccessful, you feel nothing, and you feel successful. And most of the times I'm probably feeling nothing, like that's not on my radar. I'm not thinking am I successful or not, because it's such a cognitively heavy judgment
feeling to constantly try and evaluate, because it's a very self-evaluative emotion. But like, if I remove joy from like whatever I'm doing, or rather if I start disregarding joy, then I would feel reverse of success. I would feel unsuccessful. Like why am I putting it work if I'm not even enjoying it? So that last part is definitely not what I'm saying, right? That what I'm giving is an evaluatory criteria for looking and saying was this this thing something that made me feel
successful, right? And it's saying how do I start to remove some of the confounding variables from it? So not saying that the value of the thing is going to be given by this equation, right? Like that's a different thing I'm saying, but can you isolate it and say what portion of this is what makes me feel successful? In some ways it's similar to what you were asking me when I was telling you about that project in London, where you were saying, okay, you know, so you had
a place where you were getting mastery and you also had a place where you were getting a chance to grow in your skills. And now did you have people you enjoyed working with, right? Because then it would start to feel like you're having all these components that I know make you feel successful when you've engineered and maybe for many people they make you feel successful, right? So that's what I'm trying to ask. That was just clarity. That was for intrinsic motivator. You
have agency, you have mastery and you have connectedness. If you felt all like most people would want one or more to feel intrinsic motivation to do anything, that's where almost like delight in your life would come from in a deeper sense. Is that successful? But anyway, we don't have to get sidetracked. I don't know actually. It's very interesting. Like as we are exploring this topic, I'm also
thinking about like, I would say generally been like a fairly motivated person in life. I've generally like, you know, tried to, I'm fairly success oriented, whatever my own definition of it is, I'm fairly driven. But like just discussing like over the last two conversations, discussing this has made me like really question a lot of the assumptions that I might have held about success. Like I feel like being intrinsically motivated in something is going to give you that
feeling of success. But like, I know people who wouldn't feel successful if others didn't consider them successful. Like a group that I'm in, people were discussing questions about if they should buy a house or not, like invest in real estate. And it almost felt like a lot of people were saying if you are in your mid 30s, and you haven't purchased a house, then you are not successful. Because what are you doing with your time and energy and money? And it was really
interesting to me because I was like, this is definitely not a criteria for me. I would think it would distract me if I started going like, you know, thinking about some of these safety measures is how I'm going to put it. Right. And like just having this conversation, I'm like, oh, clearly I'm between safety and meaning. I'm clearly orienting most of my success definitions around meaning and not enough around. There is no shame in having it around either, by the way.
I don't know. Like I'm just questioning a lot of things. I was reading this article about how there was a couple in the Hamptons who basically, they were extremely in debt, but like living a very like successful life or what appeared to be very successful life. And then eventually, very unfortunately, the gentleman killed himself and left to know his wife saying, you know, there's this life insurance stuff, I hope it gets you out
of debt. But secretly, we have all these like millions and millions of dollars of debts. I don't know. I was just right. I was thinking about that a little bit while you were talking where I do think there is this, I think there's this way of kind of giving off the signaling that we look for. And actually, it reminds me of, I think it's like our second episode, we actually talk about signaling and how you stay, it feels like you're the in group, right.
And I think that that is kind of the notion where it's like, oh, you know, I want to be part of this group, I want to be in these, these circles. Well, how do I do that? And that's kind of one thing and success has been tied up in that because there's an in group that is the successful in group, right. And in some ways, that's the most prized in group in culture today. And so there's where there's this notion of success tied up in that. And then I think there's a whole separate
thing of it's like, are you in a well balanced place in most of the days of your life, right? Like, are you able to kind of like, maintain your health or, you know, improve your health and improve your mental health and kind of do all the things that you need to do to feel good about yourself. And that's kind of a different definition of success, which is kind of intrinsically motivated. But it's weird because it's almost like, are you able to take care of yourself in the way
you need to be taking care of is success? That that's a crazy place to be that that we don't all feel successful. Yeah, we aren't all successful, frankly. And I also feel like there is definitely more to discuss here because we have arrived at a fairly tautological definition. Like, I define what success was that word? What does that mean? tautology means just for the listeners, tautology is a term in formal logic, like have a statement that has the proof within itself.
So you can't falsify it ever. It's like an axiom kind of not axiom. Like an axiom is an assumption that you've made. And you've assumed it to be true. But you could find data to disprove an axiom, but a tautology is structured in a fashion that you can't disprove it. Like it's a circular logic. Sometimes there are these definitions. Like a square is a four sided figure with equal sides is a square. So if you say a square is a four sided figure, like, you know, equal sides and
right angles, and then you say, like, the reverse, what do you call this figure? We call all of these figures squares. So then like, you know, now those two things are just linked. And it happens all the time in language, because that is how we define words for things. But there is no way to disprove that orange is not the color orange, and it should not be called orange, because it's like that sort of we decided to call it. Oh, yeah, there I think there's this famous line in the
Bible to where it's like, God says like, I am Jehovah and you shall worship no God before me. He has said that he is God, right? And he has said that there are no gods before him or it's somehow said in that. And it's like the definition of like what I am is in the statement I see. Yeah, interesting. Basically, so what was the statement that we arrived at that is that type of statement? So I feel like the way we have defined success is like tautological, because
it's like, I will find what is the definition of success. And I can change it anytime and it is evolving. So then like, there is no anchor outside of the human for success. But we are also saying that success is a judging emotion. So I feel like there is some gap there. Because like you can't judge from just like, you know, an internal always evolving access, which means that there is something else. And I'm curious what that is.
Yeah, it's kind of like how people who may have spent their entire career working on a product that then doesn't go to market. And then it's like, do they feel successful? Do other people feel they're successful? You know, in some of my father's friends, I know people like one of his close friends was early to the robotic space in India. And so he had spent the last, I think, 20 years, maybe a little bit more, like building these robotic arms. And now finally,
the market is there, right? There's enough demand for it. But it's for the last 20 years, there's no one buying these robotic arms, right? And so it's just interesting the way I feel like I'm already starting to see a shift in the dialogue a little bit, where it's like, oh, you know, this isn't just like his hobby, like it's actually a company that could really arrive somewhere. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it is maybe what I was suggesting a few
minutes ago, but I think that there's like a social definition, like it's, we're almost defining the same word with two, I'm sorry, we're defining two different things with the same word, where it's one where it's like, there's a social definition of like, have you created value for society in the way that society values? And then if you've done that, then we will judge you as successful. And I could give you, there's a comedian slash speaker named Alok, Alok Madan,
who has spoken about this really beautifully. Alok is a non binary person. They will have spoken about how if you saw them on the street, right, the likelihood that someone is going to like yell or slur at them because of how their dress is very high, but on stage, they'll get standing ovations, right? And it's like, what is the difference? And it's like, because of the context that we put them in, and it's like, here you're on stage, well, now you're creating value
that is going to educate society, right? And we will applaud you for it. And it's like, well, on the street, it's, we don't judge it as highly, right? It's like, oh, here you are. So I don't know. And then, but then I think there's a different thing about how you look at it for yourself. And you're saying, you know, am I being able to spend time in the way that I want to, right? And am I being able to express myself in the ways that I want to in those situations? I don't know,
it doesn't bring as true to me yet. And maybe that's just how I am today. I think that is why, like, you know, we probably felt like we can dedicate an entire season to this topic. Because it's like endlessly fascinating. Where does it come from? And like, it's super cohesive in our culture. Like, we are such a successful society. We've always been, right? Survival of the pedestrian, whatnot.
I think we were, we were talking about thinking about going towards the stories we tell ourselves about success. And I feel like that might be really interesting. I think even just dwelling into, like, what stories are the stories of successful people, right? Like, what stories get passed on in that way? And then also, yeah, what are the stories that you tell yourself about what are the best periods that have been really successful for you?
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