from kiwanc on Flickr

To my soul: [Are you ever going to be] fulfilled, ever stop desiring—lusting and longing for people and things to enjoy? Or for more time to enjoy them? Or for some other place or country—”a more temperate clime”? Or for people easier to get along with? And instead be satisfied with what you have, and accept the present—all of it.

-Marcus Aurelius

I struggle often with the notion of achievement. My assumptions in life are simple, and probably not that different than those of most people: strive to be as successful as possible and never stop learning. I know that that those goals aren’t inherently selfish or greedy—take the life of Sandor Teszler as told by Ben Dunlap, for example. And while success has many definitions, I still sometimes find it hard to reconcile the fact that I’ll never be as big of a person as Alexander the Great, Warren Buffet, or Mahatma Ghandi.

Or, when I’m in a less arrogant mood, the question is how to draw the line on achievement. How much is enough? Can’t I always be better? This is more than just intellectual wandering: I suspect the answer to this concern is the key to satisfaction with daily life, and, while I’m obviously still exploring this notion, the secret to unbelievable achievement.

I’m not aiming to use this entry to comprehensively answer the question that I just posed; the process of answering is much bigger than I can capture with some writing on a blog. Instead, I’m going to kick around some ideas, quotes, characters, and data that have shaped my answer to the question of achievement. Hopefully, they can help shape yours, too.

I mentioned in my last entry that I was inspired by a post on the Four Hour Work Week blog. I won’t repeat much of what was said in that article, and I would definitely recommend it for some context on my discussion and a no-nonsense introduction to Stoicism.

Magnitude of achievement is not the right metric

Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it?

-Marcus Aurelius

One simple lesson about achievement that is deceptively difficult to learn is that the magnitude of one’s achievement doesn’t necessarily correlate to one’s success. This seems obvious: not all of us can be as rich as Bill Gates. Barring government intervention, there will always only be one richest person in the world, and that person will almost certainly be significantly wealthier than the rest. But what about a simpler example: why shouldn’t I be concerned with the fact that someone in my workplace makes more money than me?

Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis in Outliers gives us one answer: the achievements of the world’s extraordinarily successful require extraordinary circumstance to be possible. Bill Gates, for instance, had the incredible fortune of thousands of hours of computer access for years before he started Microsoft during a time when most people needed a research grant to get a spot at a computer terminal. This allowed him to turn his passions and obvious intellect into a skill set that only a handful of people during his time could rival. The economic ramifications of such a unique skill set are obvious.

Circumstance plays a huge role in the magnitude of one’s achievement. Judging success against some “bottom-line” doesn’t take that into account. The effect isn’t just wrong; it’s dangerous: researchers from the University of Warwick had this to say about the results of a recent study—

Getting a promotion at work is not as great as many people think. Our research finds that the mental health of managers typically deteriorates after a job promotion, and in a way that goes beyond merely a short-term change.

Traditional measures of success (money, fame, power) fall short in the search for fulfillment because circumstance has too much sway over their values. Trying to rebel against circumstance leads to frustration. We need to find a way to make circumstance work for us.

A measure of success independent of circumstance

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces—to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it—and makes it burn still higher.

-Marcus Aurelius

Stoic philosophy encourages removing yourself entirely from your surroundings, accepting pleasure and pain with the same, level emotions. As described in the post on the Blog of Tim Ferris that inspired this entry, a Stoic sees every hardship as a potential opportunity for growth.

I’m an engineer because I want to build, to create. As a result, one of my favorite examples of this philosophy is contained in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart, one of the book’s protagonists, banishes herself from society at one point in the novel and finds herself in a remote town, living in a small cabin. We meet up with her later in the novel and find that she has rebuilt the roof of the cabin, installed an irrigation system for her garden, and pondered the inefficiencies of her town’s general store (if I remember the details correctly). Rather than content herself with simply letting the days pass, she found a way to build even in humble circumstances.

All of the heroes in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged exhibit the same spark of creativity, even as bankers, musicians, and industrialists. Many find Ayn Rand’s characters to be exaggerated and impossible in the real world. But what about Jacek Utko, a Polish newspaper designer that increased circulation of newspapers in Eastern Europe by as much as 100% with aggressive application of design smarts? He has this to say about his experience,

You can live in a small, poor country, like me. You can work for a small company, in a boring branch. You can have no budgets, no people, but you can still take your work to the highest possible level. And everybody can do it.

And so we stumble into a conclusion

Circumstance might decide whether we will be kings or kindergarten teachers. However, the manner of approaching life that made Alexander the Great capable of commanding an empire is possible for every single person. We can rebel against circumstance and find ourselves unhappy and unhealthy. Or, we can embrace the present we have and turn it into something unbelievable. If the experience of people like Jacek Utko are any guide, framing our ambition in the context of our circumstance is the key to success. Indeed, the secret to exceptional achievement is to acknowledge your limits in the first place.