What if our success becomes a failure? Is what you dreamed of actually what you desired?
According to Cambridge Dictionary, success is defined as “the achievement of desired results,
goals, or a positive outcome”. However, success can mean different things to different individuals, since it carries different backgrounds, and different necessities. For example, most people nowadays associate success with material and financial benefits, such as having a large house, acquiring expensive luxury items, and taking extravagant trips. Also, some people associate success based on how successful they are in their careers. Others may associate the same factor depending on their personal growth, stability and inner peace. Therefore, everyone's definition of success is distinct, as they vary according to their desires, main goals, priorities, and especially principles. Actually everything in our lives comes down to our core values, meaning they will shape most of our dreams, and consequently what we consider success, and which journey we are willing to take in order to conquer our objectives.
Regardless, we never wonder or assume that even if we achieve our goal, it may not fulfill us. Success is partly defined by a positive outcome, which is correct, since when we achieve our desire, we will have everything we always wanted. Right? However, what if when we accomplish what we have always wanted, it does not work the way we expected? Or what if it does not fulfill us like we thought it would? Whether we accept it or not, this might happen, and it does for multiple reasons.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist?, defines the failure of success by the unconscious exclusive focus illusion. Kahneman stated that “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” This basically means that when we imagine things that we want and things that will satisfy us, our attention goes exclusively to the central positive term of the objective. As an illustration, your dream is to live in a luxurious and enormous mansion, and while you are thinking about that dream that is part of what you consider success, you don't consider the negative outcomes that this achievement might result in, such as difficulties with cleaning and expensive maintenance. Consequently, this illusion results in the lack of prediction error, which is the fantasy that when the goal is achieved, we are not going to have to deal with any consequences or disappointments of it, as if life would be perfect once we achieved what we most wanted. This can be seen in the research conducted by Kahneman, where he demonstrated that people from other United States regions believed that the California population were much happier than them, because they had more sun. However, the data he collected proved those people wrong, since the satisfaction numbers show that the Californians and the non california, had the identical level of happiness. Still, those people believed that because they did not consider the prediction of error, since they were fascinated by the exclusive focus illusion. Furthermore, this is a pattern, because one factor leads to another, and the more we idealize how one thing could be, the more we are excluding how wrong and fragmented it can be.
The failure of success can also be explained by dopamine. The first person to discover this connection was Wolfram Schultz, when he was in a lab in Switzerland recording individual dopamine neurons in a monkey's brain by giving them a squirt of juice and watching the animals’ dopamine fire in response. Through the experiment, he noticed that when the monkeys learned to predict when the juice was coming, their dopamine neurons almost didn't respond at all. This emphasizes a reflection that can be seen in ourselves! Just like the monkeys, our brains do not care about the reward itself, but whether it was expected. Just like the neuroscientist AJ Keller mentioned in one of his articles “The algorithm that runs your motivation"; “A billion-dollar lottery win produces a massive dopamine burst, not because a billion dollars is objectively valuable to your neurons, but because you didn't expect it. Give someone a billion dollars every day for a year, and by day 365, the dopamine system would barely register it. The reward is the same. The prediction error is gone.” He also exemplifies this dopamine mechanism as eating cake. When we are eating cake, the second bite is never as good as the first, since while eating the first bite we will predict the cake is good. But, after tasting it, the other bites are going to match the expectations set by the first, which results in no special feeling. This also reveals why we as humans are always unsatisfied even after getting what we desired.
Additionally, when pursuing success, we almost use it as an excuse of “When I achieve X, I will be happy.” Unfortunately, it does not work like this, since happiness and fulfillment is an everyday state of mind practice, since unfortunately, it may occur that we don't achieve the X we spend endless effort and day dreaming on. One thing that is worth noticing is that success does not only become a failure when we don't predict the errors and the worst outcomes, or because we get bored due to our human problem of constant dissatisfaction. Success can become a failure even if it perfectly works out, and results in the exact reason we wanted. Success can become a failure because maybe, after years of dreaming and working hard towards an objective, we get what we wanted, but it does not feel the way we expected. We are always idealizing something, and due to the reasons I stated, we don't see its negative effects, not until we live it. As a result, when we achieve our goal, we may become unhappy, because in order to maintain the requirements for that accomplishment we perhaps need to modify part of our character, or we do it unintentionally. Maybe, we will have to leave people and relationships behind, connections, places, feelings… And then, when we have what always seemed right, it no longer feels right, because the sacrifices that the goal involved made us fail as a person. This does not mean that our "success" has failed, but it ironically means that a long-awaited win makes us break down with our true identity and expectations. For instance, many Hollywood stars and famous people around the world always wanted this attention, and while wanting so, did not think of how it would be like to handle the negative impacts of fame. In most of our successes it will work as we are famous, because we dreamed of something itself, and not with all that it would come with it.
Preventing this pattern of false and irrational idealization is complicated, since we are managing our unconscious mind and dopamine. Still, it is not impossible as long as we try to balance our dream with how it would actually be if it becomes a reality. While day dreaming about what success means to us, we need to be able to analyze the multiple possibilities it can lead to, both good, but especially and most importantly, bad, since we need to be aware that maybe success can not fulfill us the way we predicted. Therefore, we cannot concentrate all of our happiness, in something that we don't even know that is going to work, and if it does, we have no guarantee that it will be the way desired.
Ultimately, success can fail even if its outcome successfully works, because it can fail with ourselves, with who we were, what we liked, and who we liked. Success for sure means a positive impact for the achievement itself, even if it does not guarantee the impact it will have in ourselves, particularly, if we mask the goal exclusively with its positive factors. Therefore, it is essential to comprehend that we define success, and we should weigh its consequences before putting all that we are into it.
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