NOTE: We don't inhabit a fragmented reality. Nothing around us can be isolated from the catastrophic effects of the pandemic we're witnessing. All further posts on this blog will carry this caveat until there is some reasonable accountability established and substantial actions taken against the state's criminal abdication of responsibility.
Success & Failure: Yin & Yang
We all think about success and failure and what they mean to us. We have different standards of what counts as either. But we all are almost equally motivated by our desire to succeed and our fear of failure. Irrespective of what one's personal definition of success is, it is a goal oriented outcome. Which is to say that success is often defined as a destination such as "I'll be successful when I do x". Which to me is fair enough. I'm not convinced too much by the 'success as a journey' definition. This to me suffers from conceptual obfuscation. To argue that something is intrinsically valuable is to say nothing because such an argument does not use any metrics or sources of evaluation to prove its validity. Measurement of any experience or activity is possible only if we measure it either through some tool of evaluation or against something else. The most common tool of measurement is utility and functionality. Which says that something is valuable only if it either leads you to, or at least increases the likelihood of, achieving a favorable outcome. A statement that goes like - "This course I took is valuable because not only did it increase my knowledge in field X in which I want to work in, in the future, but also because having attended this course also increases my chances of getting placed in a firm which does work in this field" makes sense over a sentence that goes like - "This course is valuable because it was a journey and that has value in and of itself". The latter statement is at best a tautology (self fulfilling statement) and at worst a delusional mindset. Success has and will always be bound up in realization of goals. There is nothing intrinsically valuable in the 'journey' and the 'experiences' if they do not increase your chances to succeed or become better at something.
Also the success as journey sentiment is very similar to the idea of 'consolation prizes'. Prizes are (and should be) only due to those who have earned it. (I am not entering into discussions of how background conditions affect your chances of winning a prize. Also consolation prizes are more likely to be motivated by politeness and empathy rather than strict notions of social justice anyway). Prizes and rights are similar in so far as we don't give them to people only because it would be nice or polite to do so. Both of them can (and should) only be enjoyed by the people who they are due to. (What is due to one is a function of how a society thinks about justice. Because justice is giving to people their due and not giving them what is not due to them).
Having cleared the conceptual fog, let's get to how to achieve success or at least in most humble terms - the most likely way to achieve success. Even if we don't agree on a single definition of success, most popular notions of success share some attributes - making a comfortable living, being happy at doing what one does, some form of work life balance, or maybe complete obsession with one's work because one loves it to death, growth in career, some accolades and maybe a book or two. Of course the list is non exhaustive but that's not the point. The point is that we can perhaps agree to at least some grounds of what constitutes success. This is important because the moral relativistic argument against 'normative ideas of success' has lead to obfuscation around the idea of success itself. But is it for the worse or good? The foremost critique of anything 'normative' (something so ubiquitous that you believe that to be the only conception of the concept) is that it forces people to act in ways that they either do not wish to or makes them believe of a single way to be the only way to conduct themselves without giving them the freedom to choose for themselves what they would like to do. It can be argued that when we deconstruct success to mean only that which one defines for oneself - it is likely to maximize freedom and liberty. And anything that maximizes freedom and liberty at least prima facie, if it does not lead to a competing harm, is a good thing. (Not always - releasing a convict would lead to maximization of liberty, but would that be the right thing to do? Perhaps not) Before I proceed with possible counter arguments (which honestly is a difficult task for me because I intuitively side with liberty maximizing acts) we need to first understand the difference between a conception and a concept. A concept is the general structure or grammar of a term like success. The idea that there is societal cognizance and acknowledgement of the fact that a value such as success exists. A conception of a concept is the understanding of what the concept really means, what kinds of values it is underlined by - basically filling the inner details. So in our discussion, it is the conception of success that most people disagree with.
A vehemently disagreeing society and its politics
I have two points to make here. (broadly about concepts and conceptions and not just about success) First, if there are vociferous disagreements between the various conceptions of a concept, it is likely that over time the cultural concept itself does not hold value. Which is to say that if people rarely agree on what a concept really means, then that concept practically means nothing. That is bad because a society that does not agree on the most basic and fundamental concepts is likely to become unstable over time. Rawls argued that justice is the first virtue of societies, which broadly translates to the idea that the first and foremost thing that societies need to sort out in order to become functional is the idea of justice. And no society can do so if there are competing and almost unlimited divergent conceptions about the concept of justice. Because then not only will it become difficult to adopt some idea of justice, but any such adoption will lead to privileging the idea of justice held by only one section of society who by no other means other than the power they hold will be able to enforce their idea of justice onto others through apparatuses such as the state and religion. (This precise enquiry is at the center of a field called Critical legal studies that aims to analyze how institutions such as the state and law serve the interests of one class of society while marginalizing the other). Thus in order for societies to be able to sustain themselves and communicate amongst each other, there is a pre requisite of there being some kind of agreement regarding the meaning of certain fundamental concepts.
There are two more ways by which such a fundamentally disagreeing society would become unstable. First, by politics and policy. Individuals in power will call to their personal conceptions of justice, fairness and equality when taking decisions and formulating state policy - and a society that is bitterly divided on what those terms exactly mean is likely to react strongly to such decisions and policies by various means - thereby inducing instability. (A common example of this is the large scale protests around CAA. The act privileged the idea of equality of one section of society represented by people in power over others (and arguably even the constitutional vision for equality). A society that is divided on what equality actually means will consequently and quite naturally react bitterly to such a strong state policy)
Second, by obfuscating cultural anchors. Our discussion of success (which we have digressed from a bit), does not have much impact on politics and policy but it is a very important cultural concept. Cultural concepts often serve as anchors for people to orient themselves (I'm not going into if it is always a good thing) and decide on aims, goals and purposes. A society in which there is no clear agreement on what a concept really means is unlikely to provide an anchor of thought and direction to its people. It is also important to note that humans are not as rational and analytical as much as we give them credit for. Therefore de-constructing the normative idea of success might open the possibility of a person to create his own idea of success but by no means does the de-construction alone guarantee conception of an alternate idea of success by people. Or even if it does, there is no guarantee that the conception that comes about, comes through analytical application of mind and is good for the person or the society. After all we're social creatures and we will keep looking at external markers and ideas to anchor our own. In that sense, always arguing for de constructing everything that is normative may not be the best thing to do as it may remove key cultural markers and anchors.
Tu paisa paisa karti hai, tu paise pe kyu marti hai? (You are all about the money but why so?)
The second point is with respect the fundamental difference between the normative idea of success and other alternative 'personal ideas' of success. And that difference is about money. The core disagreements in debates around conceptions of success is regarding whether earning more money is the metric of success or not. That is the single most important distinction. All other arguments in this debate originate in this distinction. A lot of arguments that criticize the idea of measuring success through money also have a shade of the allegation that being motivated to earn more money is somehow morally wrong, or that people who are so are evil. On the other hand, my argument is that the reason why we should attach the definition of success with the idea of making more money is because as a society we should want people to generate wealth. We want this because the human incentive (not greed - that's just bad framing) to earn more money is the engine of our economic growth and the single most important social impetus for human progress. We want this engine to work because generating more wealth tends to increase the overall well being of all the people in the world and not just the people who earn the wealth. The two most common arguments underlying this are - first, earning more money increases spending and circulates more money in the economy. That in turn is likely to do all kind of good things - create jobs, raise living standards of people at all stages of society, generate capacity of economic systems all across the spectrum, increase spending power of all kinds of people. Rawls in his conception of justice as fairness also argued that inequality isn't per se bad if over a long enough period of time it tends to maximize well being of the worst off. Tyler Cowen in his books 'Stubborn Attachments' also makes the argument that given that there is no moral difference between the humans that exist now and the humans that will be born in the future (and he argues it quite well, you should read it - it's a short 200 page read) - the only way to make sure that the persons alive right now and the persons that will be born in the future have access to a better world is to commit to economic growth but within the limits of human rights and sustainability.
Second, incentive to earn money is the reason why people innovate, and innovation is at the center of human progress (human progress, not class progress. Any invention around you that has improved the lives of millions wouldn't have come about if not for the profit motive). Private companies making vaccines is a classic example of this. They weren't motivated by some abstract concept of altruism. The vaccines only came about because there was a profit motive involved. Without that, there is no innovation at all. (On a side note - see here to know why Intellectual property is not the barrier to scaling up vaccine production). Take even education for example. The reason why almost all of the students who work hard do so is to amass a good enough and robust education to be able to do well for themselves in the future. The incentive to earn more money thereby also produces brilliant scholars and professionals. (Of course people study all kinds of things because they would like to, but contrast this with how many people would still spend the same money, resources and personal time on their education if they were told that they would not be able to use their education to generate wealth later. You guessed it right, not a lot. Even people who are purely motivated by the urge to contribute to society and by altruistic notions cannot achieve much without first amassing some kind of capital and resources. You cannot help others if you're sleeping hungry or late on paying rent)
After all this sound foundational thinking, let's get back to the central idea of this piece. What is the most likely way to achieve success? Because success is such a contested term as we have discussed earlier, let me frame ideas of success in ideas of failure (which is a bit clearer concept that success). I leave you with this line that I often go back to recalibrate my own thinking on this subject.
"I don't know about success, but the surest way to fail is to do something you don't enjoy doing".
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