#32 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Success & Satisfaction At Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “After working for so long, I finally got that position. But now that I am here…it feels like a bit of a let-down.”

• “How do I tell my boss that the promotion doesn’t sound tempting? I don’t actually want the life that I see some of my bosses living. They don’t look very happy.”

• “Some of my peers tell me I ought to be looking for a position in this sector and that sector because I would be so much better renumerated. I think I’m fairly paid now and am quite happy. But sometimes I wonder if I ought to be a bit more ambitious. Is it normal to feel satisfied with where I am now?”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Success & Satisfaction At Work

THINK // 3 insights from the field

😇 THE GOOD THING about achieving success seems obvious at first glance. What’s there to talk about? Surely, succeeding in life brings many clear tangible and intangible benefits that it’s straightforward.

The Cambridge dictionary defines success as “the achieving of results wanted or hoped for”.

We want to be an X by X age, with $X tucked away.
We achieve that. We should feel successful - Right?

We want to start a family with X kids and buy a nice home.
We achieve that. We should feel successful - Right?

We want to reach X% body fat, fly first class, holiday X times.
We achieve that. We should feel successful - Right?

We want good things.
We achieve good things.

It should make us feel really good - Right?

🤬 THE BAD THING is you can achieve everything you and many others associate with success - and still NOT feel successful.

It’s a bitter pill many objectively successful people have had to swallow: Success can be easier to achieve than Satisfaction.

In this essay, best-selling writer and public speaker Simon Sinek shared:

This provokes a question - if for some reason after all his success, the momentum of his cause eventually dies down, should Sinek feel like a failure?

Many struggling authors and speakers would love to be exactly where Sinek already is right now. They might imagine if they were in his exact position, they would definitely feel successful - but Sinek himself reveals that when they do reach there, they may end up feeling exactly what he feels:

I need something more.
This is not enough.
Not yet.

What is it that causes us to go into “Not Yet”-ness?

Is that a sign of divine discontentment or dysfunctional discontentment?

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues that people need to see that happiness and satisfaction are BOTH important to experience but are very different concepts:

• Happiness is a momentary experience that comes and goes.

• We are happy IN our life, IN a moment, IN a current experience.

• We are also unhappy IN a moment, IN a current experience.

• Life Satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built a life-time of achieving goals that build the kind of life you admire. 

• We can be satisfied ABOUT our life even if we are currently IN an unhappy moments or IN an unhappy experience. Satisfaction comes as we recall our past memory bank of happy moments and reflect on the overall bigger picture of our life.

• In other words, Satisfaction is retrospective whereas Happiness/Unhappiness occurs in real time.

I’ve found that many people can be happy - and not even know it because they don’t remember it.

You can have a small win at a project at work and feel genuinely chuffed about it. You can have a great lunch conversation with a colleague that leaves you laughing in stitches.

But the moment passes and the feeling passes.

Many of life’s micro moments of happiness come and go like that - they aren’t reflected upon, captured, protected or memorialised because we think it’s not that big a deal. 

But it is a big deal.

You have to let small moments of happiness like that tell you the secrets of what you are seeking in your larger, long term picture of overall life satisfaction.

Moments and feelings flow in and out of our life.

Memory - the story we make of the moments - is what endures.

The problem is if happiness happens in real time, it must be intentionally preserved in our somatic memory bank - and not just in a digital bank on our phones, on a social media platform or in a digital archive.

To give us both that shot of 'in-the-moment' happiness and also contribute to our overall sense of life satisfaction, I think we must learn to:

• First, experience somatically and emotionally the moment of happiness as it is happening in real time

• Then, make time to protect that memory physically somehow - logging it in a journal entry, printing a photo or making an art piece of a key moment etc.

😈 THE UGLY THING that happens when we don’t take time to BOTH experience our moments of happiness AND reflect upon our overall satisfaction, we will just spend our life chasing too much of one side.

I see Happiness and Satisfaction as a polarity of two equally desirable, interdependent Good things - something we have to learn to balance throughout all time.

We need both sides, and both are each others’ natural antidotes for each others’ excesses.

• If we focus only on short-term happiness, we may bypass tough decisions that would have created temporary unhappiness but contributed to our overall life satisfaction.

  (Example: We turn down project leadership opportunities at work for the daily happiness of having less challenges to deal with. Life is generally happy and easy-going but we feel low-grade dissatisfaction and secretly envious when we occasionally reflect and compare ourselves to our peers career-wise and skill-wise.)

• If we focus only on long-term satisfaction, we can miss out out on the many joys and delights that everyday can offer.(Example: We turn down socialising opportunities for the daily rigour of maximising productivity and growing our savings. We feel satisfied at where our career, professional influence and bank account is moving but feel everyday stressed, tired and honestly a bit envious at colleagues who seem so carefree laughing with each other at work.)

What do we really need to BOTH feel happy everyday AND feel successful and satisfied with life overall?

From social scientist/psychologist David Niven’s book 100 Simple secrets of the Best Half of Life, we can pick out 5 surprisingly straightforward choices we can make:

1. Deepen your friendships.

   
   You don’t need a lot of friends - quality matters more than quantity here. You can deepen your current friendships by sharing more about what’s going on in your life. You can also explore new friendships by initiating new connections with new people and not being afraid to go beyond small talk to sharing about things that matter to you. Having closer friends brings up both life satisfaction and optimism by nearly 20%.\

2. Connect with your wider community

• Learn to like your neighbours - you’ll get a 16% greater life satisfaction and 25% lower likelihood of experiencing feelings of loneliness. Loneliness comes from 3 places of dissatisfaction: personal disconnection, interpersonal disconnection and communal/existential disconnection. Positive neighbourly relations helps solve some of that communal/existential connection.

• Explore religion and spirituality with a community of friendly, safe people. Robert Putnam and Chaeyoon Lin studied more than 3000 adults and discovered it’s not how spiritual you are that makes you satisfied, what matters is the number of like-minded people you have whom you can connect over existential questions about the big picture of values, purpose, beliefs etc. If you are agnostic or atheist, you can connect with other agnostics/atheists keen to talk about such issues or connect with other people over their religious and spiritual beliefs in a friendly, open and curious way. This gives you some of that communal/existential connection as above.

• Give back by mentoring and volunteering. Apparently, if you help mentor younger people and have a positive effect on them, it can contribute up to 4x more to your happiness bucket than your age, income or health. Again, this gives you some of that communal/existential connection as above.

3. Explore your life story.

   Reflect, write and share the stories you tell yourself about where your life came from, where it is going and what your life is all about. Apparently the simple act of writing your stories down help you feel 11% more happy about your life and 17% more likely to feel optimistic about your future. You can explore your family lineage and rewrite the meaning of the history you came from. You can make new meaning of the painful parts and make new possibilities out of the beautiful parts. You can identify changes in your viewpoints and behaviors - and what has not changed because you deeply value it. All elevates your sense of agency, optimism and sense of control over your life.

4. Grow through working towards small goals that matter to you.

   It’s not the size of the win, it’s the fact that you keep working towards wins that are meaningful to you. Small wins are good enough. As you explore your life story, you’ll discover what goals really matter more to you. You don’t have to pick goals you don’t believe in. Focus on what matters to you. As long as you have a passion to keep achieving something purposeful to you, you will feel up to 20% more satisfied with your life and positive about yourself.

5. Make meaning, not just money.

   Daniel Kahneman explains that our happiness is affected by money only when funds are so lacking that we cannot meet even our basic needs of food, water, shelter, safety, health. Generally above a certain level of income, wealth doesn’t increase happiness in a significant way. So if you are generally decently fed, clothed, sheltered and sufficiently healthy, you may not be perfectly happy (whatever that means) but you’re capable of feeling as happy as the world’s wealthiest people.

   Research is very clear: those whose values are the most materialistic tended to rate their lives as the least satisfying. Those with moderate incomes who felt their lives were meaningful were twice as likely to feel satisfied about their lives vs. those who were much wealthier but felt their lives lacked meaning.

   Meaning is not as elusive as it seems. You don’t need to climb a mountain to find a magic guru to tell you what it is.

   If you have been doing the above 4 strategies (deepening friendships, connecting to a wider community, exploring your life story, working on small goals that matter), you are finding your way to meaning - and a path to everyday happiness and overall satisfaction.

These are not new concepts.

The ugly truth some of us might have to face is a part of us refuses to believe happiness and satisfaction can be as simple as those 5 things.

But there have been many good people who have gone before us, who’ve lived through many ugly things who keep wanting to share with us the story of what we all should be searching for in life.

The late comedic genius Matthew Perry achieved professional and financial success beyond his imagination yet he struggled publicly with life-threatening addictions to alcohol and drugs.

Perry did not disown the happiness his success brought him.

Having material privileges gave him significantly more resources to keep fighting off his inner demons. (Perry estimated he spent around $9 million trying to free himself from alcohol and drug addiction.)

He actually credits his success on Friends, his happiness about the professional work he did and the support of his work colleagues for helping him sober up and stave off his substance addiction from time to time.

Still, he shared in his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, how he’d felt the day his hit TV sitcom “Friends” finally came to an end.

Perry concluded for himself:

Perry found a lot of meaning in the later parts of his life through using his painful experiences to counsel other addicts.

In an interview with podcaster Tom Powell, Perry gives us a clue of what he was realising were the rightful “dreams-come-true” that were bringing him the deepest satisfaction even in the midst of his unhappy ongoing struggles:

Perry died too young at 54.

In his memoir, he offers us this parting wisdom he wished he understood earlier.

I hope we can take in a kind of final prayer he is offering for those of us who still feel plagued by a sense of “not enough”, “not yet” and the painful struggle to achieve more, be more, succeed more.

May more of us understand his words and take it to heart:

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

READ  Executive coach Dina Denham Smith’s essay on what you can do if you are a chronic over-achiever:

READ this TIME article that collects the research links cited by David Niven’s book 100 Simple secrets of the Best Half of Life

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

Try doing a daily reflection on any of these 5 things we need to feel happier and more satisfied:

• What friendships have I deepened this week? What friendships would I like to deepen next week?

• How have I connected with my wider community this week? How can I connect more with neighbours, a spiritual community or through volunteering?

• What am I learning so far about my life story: past, present, future? Have I changed in my viewpoints or behaviours in any way?

• What small goals do I want to work on that matter to me? How am I doing on them this week? What can I do for them next week?

• How can I work more towards meaning - and not just money?