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