Success

Any decent dictionary can define success for you in an unexceptionable way. Success is attaining a desired result. Thus, a successful building project is one in which the building gets built, and a successful builder is one who can complete such projects. The problem comes when you stop talking about specifics like buildings and builders and begin talking in general. What does it mean for a person to be a success? The question does not ask about success at something in particular, like constructing a building. Rather, it asks about success as a person.

Here the dictionary definitions are not so helpful. It is difficult for a mere dictionary to tell you the desired result of being a person so that you can check to see if you have attained it. Dictionaries do try, however, to express dominant cultural values. A typical desktop dictionary gives this as a second meaning: “the attainment of wealth, position, honor, or the like.”

Cultural Understandings of Success

Such a view of success has two strong variants in Western cultures. The first is the “crass” vision of success. A commonly seen poster embodies this meaning. It shows a pile of cars, jewelry, houses, and money. At the bottom is the caption: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” The poster is poking fun at the crass vision of success. But that understanding of success is around us and has its appeal. Yet when we actually think about living life compiling material goods, just so we can die at the end, it seems less compelling. The crass vision of success cannot seriously help determine whether a person has attained the desired result of life.

The second common variant of success avoids the excesses of the crass vision. It says that success in life means being materially comfortable and relatively independent. Attaining these goals allows you the possibility of attaining whatever other goals you might decide are worth pursuing. This vision is somewhat attractive. Being free from the immediate requirement of self-preservation and being safe, fed and warm do seem to be a good foundation for whatever particular success you might want to achieve. Yet there is a subtlety here. This common vision of success, for all its attractions, is what you might call vertical. It envisions success as being attained by an individual’s climbing over adversity and attaining comfort. And the not-so-hidden assumption is that the measure of this success is still fundamentally economic. In the end this variant is not all that far from the crass vision of success.

Everyone wants to be successful, by which we mean attaining some set of life goals. But the economic description of success implicit even in the comfort-and-independence idea is far too limited to describe what we really mean by success. As a thought experiment, consider the following people who were undeniably successful in some sense but do not fit into the comfort-and-independence idea of success: Socrates, Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Søren Kierkegaard, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. This list could be extended arbitrarily, but the point it makes is simple. Many people have been successful in a way we find meaningful without having been either comfortable or independent. Some of them deliberately sacrificed both comfort and independence to attain their success. Furthermore, some of them attained success that was outside the scope of their own lifetimes: they died as failures but were clearly successful nonetheless.

We should call the people on this list (and others who could easily be added to their number) the uncomfortable succeeders. They make it clear that success is both broader and deeper than the simple definition of comfort and independence would lead us to believe. Success seems to be inextricably linked with attaining goals that are deep within a person but also far broader than a single individual. Whatever success as a person is, it is neither simple nor, apparently, easily attained.

Success and Character

Stephen Covey claims to have uncovered two divergent themes in two centuries’ worth of American literature on success. The first dominated for the 150 years or so, and he calls it “the character ethic.” This approach “taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character” (Covey, p. 18). The character ethic includes virtues like integrity, fidelity, patience, industry and simplicity, virtues that can be attained only through sacrificing a certain amount of comfort and independence.

The past fifty years has, by contrast, been dominated by a vision of success that Covey calls “the personality ethic.” In this vision “success became a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the process of human interaction” (Covey, p. 19). Various schools of positive thinking and other popular approaches counsel that manipulating your own personality to maintain a particular attitude, or to “win friends and influence people,” is the correct approach to success.

Covey and others have found this latter approach, however dominant it has been for the past two generations, fundamentally flawed and superficial. It thinks of success as something added to a person (like comfort and independence) rather than something that grows out of a person. Success understood in terms of a character ethic sees it as something that comes from the gradual unfolding of the best of what a person can be. But although success is rooted in a person’s becoming a good person, exemplifying the virtues of that life, success is not limited to a kind of personal evolution and attainment, however good it might be. The uncomfortable succeeders may perhaps have been virtuous individuals, but that is not the measure of their success. Rather, they were successful in that they were successful for others regardless of what they attained for themselves.

The uncomfortable succeeders, and many like them, are successful just because they are not driven to attain success in its own right. Rather, they are driven to serve others, to make them successful, and so become successful themselves in the process. Kierkegaard’s way of saying this is that it must be approached by means of indirection. To be successful, you must not try to find success directly. Instead, by trying to attain a different goal like helping others succeed, you discover that (lo and behold!) success has found you.

A Biblical Vision of Success

If we come to the Bible with one of the common understandings of success, it will provide us no help at all. Indeed, some analytical concordances show no uses of the word success at all in English translations. This, in itself, does not mean that the concept of success is absent; rather, it may imply that many translators believed that the common sense of success was not a good match for what the biblical writers were trying to express.

If the biblical writers believe in success, they do not think it is at all wrapped up in comfort and independence. On the contrary, they are often exhorting those who will listen to seek other goals. Success, for them, is measured by the attainment of other goals for the sake of other people. As good an example as any of this inversion of the idea of success comes in the letter to the Philippians. Quoting what was apparently a common Christian song of the time, the letter says,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5-11 NRSV)

This is a remarkable vision of the path to success. First, it is highly centripetal in its orientation. Far from concentrating on the self and arranging things so its goals are met, the orientation is spinning outward as hard as possible. Everything here is other-directed; nothing is oriented to self-attainment. Second, the vision of success finds its fulfillment not in success but in another state entirely: servanthood. The servant has no guarantee of comfort nor independence (compare Phil. 4:10-13). Yet the way of the servant is, paradoxically, the way of success. In order to find success one cannot grasp after it but must accept and embrace its opposite. If you want with all your heart to be successful, that passion itself will make you fail; if you are willing to become a servant, you will find a different kind of success waiting for you there.

The uncomfortable succeeders all, in their own manners, went the way of the servant. Embracing service gave them the freedom not to have to succeed and so allowed them to do so. Jesus and the other uncomfortable succeeders knew their efforts were doomed from the point of view of success measurement. By not concerning themselves with attaining success, but instead concerning themselves with being servants, they allowed success to surprise them and overtake their activities.

For this very reason, because Jesus humbled himself, God gave Jesus the name above all other names. Those around us who seek directly for success find that it eludes them. All they have in its place are the ambition and self-involvement they used in their quest. The crass vision of success, according to which the one who has the most toys when he dies wins, has loftier neighbors, each of which is just as wrong. The goal may be the most friends or the most good deeds or the most converts or the most victories. In every case they are less crass than the materialistic version and no less wrong. All seek success directly and can be measured against their particular goals. All miss success, from the biblical point of view, because they are not willing to attain success on the way of the servant.

» See also: Ambition

» See also: Failure

» See also: Professions/Professionalism

» See also: Values

» See also: Virtues

References and Resources

S. R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

—Hal Miller