Inertia — Nº170
Success as a side effect
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
— Viktor Frankl
For centuries, we’ve heard the echoes of history’s philosophers reciting the importance of rooting ourselves in the present moment. Epictetus (50 – c. 135 AD) expressed how we ought to concentrate specifically on our internal condition, while Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 AD) grew famous for his notions of power over the mind rather than what we can’t control on the outside.
It’s been on my mind lately. The picture above has a lot of meaning to me for this reason; it’s where I spent much of my teenage years learning ideas and clearing my mind from stress or anger toward situations and problems I had going on at the time. It led me to the dictum of acting over reacting and seeing happiness and success as byproducts, principles that made me a better person.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”, said Frankl. In essence. It’s our duty to learn to do what we have decided to do over what our body, emotions, or unreliable brain is suggesting instead. We owe it to ourselves to change when our environment refuses to do so, to control our response when it wants to work against us, and to nail our approach to any situation rather than hastily or numbingly react to it.
The quote “Focus on what you can control” is not about fixating on small or mundane choices that make us feel like life is more under our rule. It doesn’t concern whether you’ll have eggs or coffee or toast for breakfast, or whether you’ll go for a morning run or stay in bed.
Building a strong internal locus of control boils down to having a tremendous singular focus on how we do things, not what we do.
So, eggs or toast — it’s not necessarily important; what if you choose eggs but find you’ve run out? What if you skip breakfast to look after the kids or get to work? Or, to go straight to the worst case, what if you get to work only to find you’ve been laid off—as many have done from business’s poor read on what’s in their control after the pandemic?
These things can happen, and you can’t really control them. But, you can control how rational, stable, or emotionally reactive you want to be.
Keeping your internal state calm and free of noise helps you learn to relax and return to a steady state. The better you can relax in any real-life situation, the happier you’ll be, and the faster you'll make good decisions.
What this all means is that success and happiness aren’t destinations to be reached but rather effects of a life well-lived in service of that which is greater. Focus less on external events, surrender your ego, and dedicate yourself to learning everything you can as you wander through life.
It’s akin to watching a child at play. The joy and wonder on their faces aren’t from calculated pursuits but the unintended bliss that comes from immersing themselves in what they see. We lose this touch as adults, mistakingly believing that happiness and success are commodities to be competed for rather than experienced as positive catalysts towards a more important goal, such as love or a strong family.
Frankl’s words shed light on why many outwardly “successful” people still feel—and perhaps hide—a sense of emptiness and discontent: they place their crowning achievements and wealth at the forefront of who they are, missing the deeper point.
Happiness and success derive from things more transcendent—be it social activism, scientific exploration, artistic expression, or simply being more compassionate to loved ones each day. These are things we can control, and that brings us back to this: living authentically and harmoniously with our principles. With this at the front of your mind, you’ll no longer anxiously chase validation but live a more soulful life striving for self-confidence, beauty, purpose, and equanimity. And as a result, you’ll naturally find the success and happiness you’ve been seeking all along.