The Theory of Success: The Ultimate Handbook of Understanding Every Aspects Success

Why money and monitory profits are weak purposes for the brain?

Money by definition is a promise of certain value by an authority to you. If you look inside any currency notes, the authorized bank of that country promises you that you hold value equivalent to the denomination written on the money.

One of the most critical things to remember here is that no matter how trustworthy an authority is, money is still a promise, and a promise is still not real. Therfore when you start setting and chasing goal for the purpose of accumulating more promises, the brain starts getting more into the fantasy world.

Hence people say the more one earns the more one goes away from the ground reality.

Therefore one with more money becomes more insecured of loosing the money. On the other hand if one has achieved certain skills and knowledge, there is no fear of loosing that skill or knowledge.

But can we not buy everything we want when we have a lot of money?

The very important factor in the above statement is want, not need. Yes, when you have more money, you can buy 6 houses, if you so want. However, we don’t need that many houses. So the more you have things that you wanted but not needed, the more resource your brain has to invest in keeping them. Because you did not need a lot that you acquired, brain has to create a fantasy around why they are needed. Thus brain stays more in the fantasy.

What purpose does charity solve? Is it a higher purpose?

Charity serves the purpose of bringing the rich into reality. If you have something(like money) in excess and you give it to those who need it but can’t afford it then your brain perceives this as higher prupose and so that goal of becoming richer becomes higher purpose.

However, please note that the way without a strong or higher purpose, your goal becomes meaningless, getting things that one needs easily without grinding for it also makes those beneficiaries more greedy and lazy. As brain do not work in two different ways, their brain starts desiring more, and for free.

For instance, a charity hospital for the poors may appear a novel act, but this eliminates the need for the poor to take good care of their health and not getting ill at the first place. Your charity may become poison for someone else.

When brain perceives that your charity irrespective of the higher purpose you thought it serves is causing negative outcome to the society, the brain again starts hating you for the same. Therefore excess charity also leads one to spend more time in the fantasy world.

The best way a charity can be invested is to create opportunities for people and for the future; for instance a science and research center, a market where poor farmers can get better price for their products, a park where people can come and walk and improve their health.

Difference between Milestone and Target

A milestone is point where you want to reach, or an object that you want to have. A target is when you pay your entire attention and focus towards the milestone and attach your emotions and allocate your time for achieving the milestone.

As we already know that your brain doesn’t care about the milestone if there is no goals attached to it, a target can be defined as a focussed attention, energy, emotion, and time allocated to achieve a goal. It is simply the direction towards which you are about to move your life to achieve the target.

One of the best parallels to the target is the archery, where an archer aims at the score circle, channelizes all his energy, focus on the aim, gathers all the emotions and sets the arrow free from the bow towards the target.

When you have a goal, you can never achieve it, without setting your life’s target to achieve it. You have to see your life as the arrow, and point it at the goal, channelize your energy, and release your life towards the goal.

Summery

Let us summerize the points we learned in this section:

1. Becoming richer with more money doesn’t make one more successful.
2. Charity is not always a higher purpose.
3. Strong purpose is when you try to solve your fundamental biological needs of survive, thrive, and reproduce.
4. Higher purpose is when you want to solve the fundamental purposes of many people, so that they can solve your other purposes.
5. A milestone is a wish.
6. A milestone with a purpose is a vision.
7. A milestone with a vision, timeline, plan, rules, and processes is a goal.
8. When you set a goal and start your journey towards the goal, the starting point is called an idea.
9. The journey from idea to achievement is called execution.
10. More money moves us away from the ground reality.
11. Staying in the ground reality all the time 24×7 is suffering.
12. Money is merely a promise, and not a real object.
13. Monitory profit increases greed.

With the above, you can now set your goals appropriately. I leave the plan, rules, process and timeline towards the end of the article.

B. The correlation between success, goal, and achievement

Achievement is crossing the milestone of the goal. Achievement is a feeling that our brain gets through increased dopamine levels. That is why it is said that “achievement gives you high.” Here, high is very high levels of dopamine hormone.

Therefore success is the emotion that contains the journey of setting up the goal, to working towards the goal, facing challenges, overcoming them, and finally achieving the goal.

When you set up the goal, you set your feelings to desire, hope, and want. You don’t have the goal now, but you want to have it. Goals serve one of the critical biological functions, that is thriving.

Why do we keep setting and chasing bigger goals?

You might have already observed in your life that when you completed your schooling, you felt like achieving a milestone in life. Then you set up a goal of cracking better colleges for your graduation. Once you get into a reputed top college, you might have set goals to achieve extraordinary scores in the semester examinations. Once you started achieving higher grades, you might have set your goal to crack the campus placement. Once you cracked the campus placement, you might have set the goal of getting a promotion immediately after joining your job.

All along, you might have felt successful in cracking a good college, cracking the campus interview, and so on. Whenever you will think about your success, you will think about your entire journey how hard you struggled, and how you overcame barriers and roadblocks up till the point of achievement.

However, because achievement is a feeling, and we already know that feelings are relative changes in the hormonal levels, once you get the high feeling, you will not stay in the high feeling forever.

However, dopamine is addictive. When dopamine goes higher you feel euphoria, above the world. Once you get that dopamine level, your brain wants more. The next goal you set and you achieve, the brain again gets high dopamine, so it wants more. Therefore we keep setting goals.

Again the sense of achievement is a feeling which is the relative change in the hormones. So if your dopamine levels in the second achievement don’t go higher than the first, then you will not feel high. In such a case, even though you set a goal and achieved it, and you might have worked hard for the achievement, you did not feel anything because your achievement produced the same level of dopamine as it did for the first time you achieved.

So, we keep getting larger and larger goals. If you think it is only you, then you would be wrong. Because setting and achieving higher goals serves the biological purpose of thriving, it is common across the animal kingdom.

For instance, when you take an anti-bacterial under a bacterial infection, the bacterial colony sets a goal of adapting to the antivirus and becoming immune to the new drug. This is how you become antibacterial resistant.

When lions get their prey like small pigs continuously, they set a higher prey target like a Bison.

Continuously setting, chasing, and achieving the higher goal itself become a habit, and one keeps running. This run is also called a rat race.

C. How to come out of the rat race and become more satisfied?

We must have often felt that even after setting and achieving higher goals, you are not getting any satisfaction. Success is an emotion, achievement is a feeling, and satisfaction is the higher and more stable emotion.

Satisfaction creates stronger memory and whenever we recall that memory, the hormone serotonin is released. The more satisfied we are the more Serotonin is released.

Serotonin receptors are highest in the pre-frontal part of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is also our conscious brain, as well as the major decision-making executive center. So the more satisfied you are, the better decisions you make. The more conscious you become, the less and less risky options and goals you choose in life.

Serotonin has a much higher lifetime than dopamine, and therefore after achieving few goals, many try to find satisfaction, rather than success.

Why satisfaction becomes elusive?

We discussed above that setting higher goals and achieving them become a habit, and it is extremely hard for the brain to come out of a habit and something that it has been doing over and over again, even though one looks for satisfaction, the brain still pushes one to set one last higher goal. Then again when you want to search for satisfaction, your brain again tricks you to set a goal one last time.

Therefore the more goals one achieves and the more success one sees, the less and less satisfied one will be. Paradoxically, if one achieves no goal, one would still be unsatisfied due to unfulfilment of the Biological need of Thriving.

Satisfaction ∝  (Σ Achievement)/Time of life invested to get the achievements

Equation (1)

Achievement is the increase in the dopamine level after you reach your goal, and success is the emotion, which is the entire journey that includes effort, roadblocks, preparations, challenges, and everything from setting the goal to achieving the goal.

Therefore it is quite clear from equation(1), that if your achievements are zero in life, your satisfaction will be zero. When you set a small goal and achieve it, your satisfaction will be lower, but not zero. As you keep achieving more but more time in life has gone by in achieving them, then again Satisfaction starts falling down.

D. How Satisfaction determines happiness, and why do achievers as well as non-achievers both mostly remain unhappy?

Happiness is a persistent state of satisfaction. So if you are satisfied every day, you will be happy every day. However, one who achieves nothing gets no satisfaction and therefore remains unhappy. On the other hand, achievers remain unhappy till they achieve the next goal. Because the sense achievements are shortlived(as it is a feeling), and stories of success keep getting faded, the more one achieves the more unhappy one remains.

But if achievement also makes us unhappy, why does everyone push us to achieve more?

Corporations, society, and average people never want you to be satisfied, because in that case, you will slow down. So everyone tricks you to chase that elusive satisfaction by setting and achieving higher goals.

When you are not thriving, due to not meeting the key biological need of thriving you start feeling dead. In such a situation, your energy dips. Due to unhappiness, you start experiencing a negative energy in you. Negativity spreads like a virus and affects everyone around you. Therefore people motivate you to set and chase goals. At least you will be happy some days after and once you achieve your goals.

E. Why competition plays a major role in success?

Let us recall again that success is an emotion. It is the entire story of setting the goal to achieve the goal. This story has the high and the low and is the story of your struggle. Achievement is short-lived and momentary, but success is stored in our memory.

If there are no roadblocks and no competition, then there is no struggle and no lows and highs in your story. Therefore the story itself becomes less emotional. The more highs and lows a story has, the more emotional that story will be.

It is important to remember here that intensity of an emotion is not the positive feelings, but the number of events and their associated lows and highs that determines how strongly we feel an emotion.

So if you are only chasing the positive feelings and experiences in life, you will have fewer and fewer emotions. Because happiness is an emotion, happiness coming from achievement is a positive emotion, those who chase only achievement will become less and less emotionally sensitive over a period of time.

Competition comes to the rescue here. When you have more competition, you face more roadblocks. The more roadblocks and challenges you face in your journey to achieve the goal, the more negative and positive feelings and events will be present in your successful emotional story.

Therefore it is said that where there is no competition, there is no success.

The problem is, when you start seeing life only through the success story of achieving higher goals, your brain will feel less and less, and then the very competition will irritate you.

Why do we hate the competition if the competition is healthy?

In the beginning, the competition will appear healthy. This is because it will add the necessary ups and downs to your story. But the higher goal you set, the competition will be higher. Once you keep achieving, your brain will feel less, so it wouldn’t care for the success, and would want to only achieve. Because your success is the story that needs competition, the higher you go the higher competition will irritate your brain the more.

Persistent frustration of delayed and difficult achievement and irritation then starts making you angry, as the brain is not getting high, and also it is unhappy. Persistent unhappiness leads to aggression, and persistent aggression leads to hate.

Therefore in your higher goals, any roadblock will irritate, and frustrate you. If competition is the cause for such irritation, then you will start hating the competitor because you are already angry with yourself for not achieving smoothly.

F. Redefining success as the success of life

So far we have limited ourselves to a very thin definition of success, which is nothing but your story from setting goals to achieving them. Everyone in life wants to be happy and satisfied.

Because the ultimate pursuit of life is achievement and satisfaction, success can be redefined as reaching the ultimate goal of sustained satisfaction and happiness, where the goal itself is achieving persistent satisfaction and happiness.

All right, you have set some goals, achieved them, and created stories, which are successful for you. Now you stop and you take a pause and you focus on achieving the ultimate success of life, which is achieving happiness.

But recall the problem is both achievers as well as non-achievers will remain unsatisfied and thus unhappy. Can we not break this paradox?

The ways to become more satisfied

Of course, we already know through our model that

Success ∝ 1/Anxiety

Lyfas Success formula derivation

Whatever your pursuit are, whether you are a sportsman, a coder, a sales personnel, a marketer, a clinician, or a research scientist, the biggest cause of Anxiety is your fear of the unknown and fear of failure.

Why fear is so important and so natural?

We are biologically wired to suspect something bad happening to us all the time. There have been several surprises in all of our lives, and there have been bad experiences. Therefore irrespective of one’s past experience or expertise, one would always be apprehensive and doubtful about the outcome of the current endeavor or a decision.

Anxiety is sustained subconscious fear.

When there is a threat in the real world, it results in stress, and when there is a fear in our imagination and the fear sustained for a long period of time, it is anxiety.

Fearlessness

If you are to believe the internet and the experts, then fearlessness is the most important skill to become successful. However, nothing can be far from the truth than this.

We all know that satisfaction is overcoming fear. When you become successful in overcoming your fear, you feel more satisfied. For instance a risky voyage, a project that had little chance to succeed like a space mission, summiting Everest, diving the Mariana Trench, and so on. So, we can write:

Satisfaction=Success x Fear

Now if the Fear is zero, then irrespective of how successful you are, if the fear is zero, then you will have no satisfaction. For instance, after defending his world chess Championship three times, Magnus denied to defend it for the 2023 championship as this gave him no satisfaction.

Reduced Satisfaction

The reason is that when you try to achieve something for the first time, your fear is immense. The next time, your fear is reduced a little bit because you have already been there, done that. Next time it will be much lesser, as you have already done it twice and so on. Therefore the more you achieve the same goal of overcoming the fear, your satisfaction level in achieving the same decreases.

Success key metrics when the goal is to become satisfied with life

Therefore, we can summarize this section by noting the following points about success.

1. Success is equivalent to overcoming sustained subconscious fear of the unknown, and fear of failure.
2. Satisfaction is success multiplied by fear, where the bigger fear we overcome to our success, the higher satisfaction we get.
3. If we get repeated success in a goal over and over again, our fear reduces, and so does our satisfaction.

G. What is Failure?

Failure is defined as not achieveing enough higher goals, and then not pursuing and achieving the ultimate pursuit of life that is satisfaction and happiness.

Why oposite to success is not failure?

When you set a goal to achieve, but you fail to overcome the challenges, roadblocks and defeat competitor, then that is not failure. Because success is an emotion, which is a story, not achieveing the goal yet is also an emotion as that is also a story. The success story ends with high dopamine, but the not-yet-successful story doesn’t end with high dopamine. Howver not-yet-successful also has memories, events, feelings.

Because till you achieve the goal you set for yourself, brain keeps pushing you towards the goal till you either achieve it, or give up on it, not-yet-successful story serves as the learning for the brain. In the next journey to the goal, your brain would remain more careful not to perform the things it performed in its first inability to achieve the set goal.

Therefore oposite to success in achieving a goal is not failure, but learnings.

As we know that inability to keep achieving enough higher goals and thereafter inability to become happy and satisfied is failure, failure can be defined as an inverse function of success and satisfaction.

Failure ∝ 1/(Satisfaction+success)

Therefore, if you achieve nothing failure will be immense but not infinity, because not succeeding in achieving a goal will also give you some satisfaction through learning.

However if one never sets a big enough goal and never pursued that goal, then there will be no success, no learning, and obviously no satisfiction, and thus failure=∞.

Therefore the biggest failure is not setting big enough goal and pursuing the goal.

H. Why different people define success in different ways?

Anything that you don’t understand deeply may lead to disasterous decisions in life. Today when you search internet for definitions of success and try to understand success, you will be left more confused than answered. This is because different people see success from different parameters.

Some think not pursuing a goal, and thus not running a rat-race is success. Some think achieving small but achievable goal is success. Some think that achieving something and then never pursuing any goal is success. Some think that they can become satisfied without achieving anything. Some think that achievement itself is satisfaction. Some think that satisfaction itself is an achievement.

Some think that laughing in a joke is happiness. Some think laughing through a comedy is happiness, and because happiness gives satisfaction, watching comedy and laughing a lot is the success. Because learning also gives satisfaction, some think that not achieveing anything but simply learning things(from books and blogs) is the satisfaction.

Some thinks that seeing everyone happy is the satisfaction. Some think making someone else successful will make one successful and satisfied. Some think setting an unrealistic goal and never achiving it, but rather learning from the journey itself is success.

Because most see the life through the prism of their life, often an author remains biased on the definition and explanation of the fundamentals in life. Therefore there are more definitions of success today than the successful lives.

I. Timing, Rules, Plans, Processes

You may be wondering why did we leave these four for the last and why did we not cover them at the beginning? All of these four factors of goals are essential components of execution. If you do not have necessary knowledge, and skills to select a milestone to achieve, then you can not calculate the timeline that is a fair timeline to achieve the goal. You can not also determine the rules, because you can set rules, or play by the rules based on your area of experties and skills. And when you have the timeline and the rules set, you can then create a plan as how you will execute, and a process to execute the plan.

What is a realistic timeline for a goal? How to determine a realistic timeline?

A realistic timeline is average timeline(± 20%) people have taken before you, with your age and skills to achieve the milestone that you are setting target at.

So suppose you want to get a job in any of the multinational companies, and you are 20 years old now, average age of getting an IT job in a multinational company is about 29 years, and so you still have 9 years to achieve your goal. However, if you are already 35, targetting to get an IT job in a multinational will not be the right goal, as you have already crossed the 20% upper limit of the average timeline.

If we have to fix a timeline for the success, then why do people say that there is no right time to target a goal, the best time is now?

Iscon’s founder Prabhupad ji started his mission of spreading Krishna consciousness at the age of 78. There are several instances in the history where one has achieved something way past the average age. One of our M.Tech batch mates, Mrs. Saraswati completed her M.tech at the age of 59, only a year before her retirement.

Even though you can set a target at a goal and pursue that goal at any age, every age has its emotional and existential needs. If all the jobs are vanished in the future and the only way one can live and feed the family is by hunting, then irrespective of the age, one will have to target to become a good hunter.

Such goals are strongly linked to the survival. However, if you pursue the goals just because some day in the past you had dreamt about the goal, then be rest assured that reaching the goal will not bring as much satisfaction in the end life. It will satisfy you at the moment you achieve the goal, but in the context of your overall life, you will often find this pursuit as not a strong pursuit.

Average age of writing the first book is often 36 years. I published my first book at the age of 40, which is 11% higher than the average, but within the acceptable timeline, and so the book satisfied me. However, if had set my goal to publish the book at the age 60, the age where I intend to spend time with my grandkids, telling them stories, the first publication might not have satisfied me as much.

It often takes 4-8 months to write a good book. I completed the Intimacy book in 11 months, whereas the PAIO book in one month and Zero-to-Plus Minus Equal to over a period of 3 years. Therefore the Intimacy book satisfied me the most.

What is Rules in the pursuit of the goal? Why rules play an important role in the life?

You must have heard the cliche “Everything is fair in love and war.” This suggests that the only rule is winning a competition to achieve a goal, and there must not be any rules into the process.

However, we already know that achieving one goal wouldn’t bring any satisfaction to you, and you have to achieve several higher goals to become satisfied with the life to a degree. If you set the rules, brain can follow the same set of rules over and over again for all the future pursuits, because brain can not work in different ways.

So for instance you decide to scavange something, and snatch away someone else’s property, then you set the rule of scavenging. Every time your brain would want to scavange, and you will be only competing against other scavengers.

Just like a soccer game, every pursuit has some rules.

A rule is simply set of behavior that you have to maintain throughout the pursuit. When you break the rules, there will always be a punishment, and when you follow the rules, there will be higher rewards.

For example when you are pursuing the life partner, you may set the rules such as:

1. I will become a better human being every day so that my partner meets a better person every day.
2. I will become valuable for my partner and take care of some of partner’s needs so that the partner can take care of some of my needs.
3. Our relationship will be strongly based on interdependency which we will transform to intimacy.
4. I will not lie or try to control my partner.
5. I will not manipulate my partner to trick the partner to be with me.
6. I will prioritize our relationship daily over other wants.

And so on. When you set the rules and follow the rules, your brain works in a structured way. It knows what to do and what not to do. Therefore the brain doesn’t have to become anxious for every micro-decisions.

However, if your rule is “I will anyways marry my partner and there will be no rules,” your competitors will also follow no rules, and they may come after your profession, life, and even your partner without any rule in place.

What is a plan?

A plan is breakdown of the final goal into smaller goals that you can achieve quickly. This serves two key purposes: Firstly your fundamental need of achieving higher goals are served everyday, at the same time, they also bring you small amount of satisfaction everyday. So, you don’t have to stay unhappy till you achieve the final success.

Because a plan is a small subset of goal, everything that is applicable for the goal is also applicable for a plan. Hence a plan must also have a purpose, rule, process, milestone and timeline. You will also face competition in executing the plans. However, successfully executing one plan after the other in your journey to achieve the goal will keep you excited for the goal.

This is why the rules become such an important aspect of the success. When you set the rules, your brain can follow the same set of rules for each next plan while its pursuing the final goal.

Rules helps you to take advantage of habit brain and reduce overthinking as you know how you will execute the plan even before you start the execution. Because you have already achieved success with past plans, your brain will also have confidence in going for the next plan or goal.

What is process?

If you follow the same set of steps for two or more successive plans in achieving goals, then those set of steps become a process.

A process is simply repeatable sets of actions that you take to execute a plan.

Explaining the process in detail is beyond the scope of this article.

J. Why becoming successful in life also doesn’t satisfy and make people happy?

We already know that success is nothing but a story that has all the different events from idea to acheievements, and the high and low feelings attached to the success story.

There are two ways a story gives us emotion, a) While recalling the story b) While telling and sharing the story with the others

The problem is the way you get bored by achieving same goals over and over again, you get bored by ruminating same story in your mind over and over again. Anytime you think about a past story, you get into the imaginative brain. We know that staying in imagination for long period of time makes you mentally unhealthy.

The next choice is to share the story with others. Because we are a social animal, whenever we share the story with others, and we see emotion in their eyes, hormone Oxytocin, our social hormone gets released. This gives us the social happiness.

Why people congratulate you even when they are envious about your success?

We have already learnt that everyone has to continuously pursue goals, satisfaction and happiness in life. So far you have already understood that this quest itself is a fulltime daily work. No one has any time left for thinking about the others if there is nothing in it for them.

We are interested in someone’s success stories only and only if either a) We are part of that journey and are being acknowledged(being acknowledged gives us satisfaction) or b) We have something to learn that we do not know, but need in order to become successful.

Now let us assume that you got a job and you share a social media post “I am excited to share that I have got my dream job in Google,” no one is interested in that news, because it is your job, your dream, your achievement, and they have nothing to do with it.

People still congratulate you to appear as social and part of your success story. However, such likes and comments will initially give you some high, but at the end you will not care about it. This is because people are congratulating you without reflecting emotions to your success story.

What is social success?

Ofcourse we know that achieving success is not enough, you need to have people who are interested to listen to the success story, and who would get wither an acknowledgement or learning out of your success story.

We have too many learnings these days. The internet is full of “success stories” of how a poor guy achieved glory. We are infact overloaded with such stories which provides no real insights that can be beneficial for our own journey.

Even when you provide insights, and share true learnings of your journey, not many can implement them in their journey because every individual is different. Therefore the best possibility of becoming successful is by becoming successful as a group, alongside a lot of people.

There are 139 investors in Acculi Labs Lyfas project. So, as we are becoming successful, it is not my success, but success of all of us. All of us have our stories, purpose and reasons to be attached with the project. All of us have different emotions, and feelings for the journey, and so it makes all of us happy and satisfied. Therefore my and all our investor’s happiness and satisfactions are much higher than say an entrepreneur who becomes successful by establishing a profitable company.

Always remember,

1¹⁰⁰ = 1,
but, 2² =4,

So, even if you put 100 times more effort towards your journey for the success, eventually that is only going to give you 1 unit of satisfaction. But if two of you walk together in the journey, and each put only twice the effort, the success, and satisfaction will be four times.