Stop Glamorizing Achievement

From the Kardashians to Elon Musk, we humans love elevating others to hero status. Stati? Statuses? Anyway, while this practice is annoying, it is also harmful because by ranking someone at the top we necessarily place people at the bottom.

Money. Power. Good looks. ‘Success’. We are selecting winners as if life is a competition to be won — or lost.

The very act of elevating a winner implies we are the loser, doesn’t it? Everyone except the winners. There end up being very few winners and a lot of losers.

Feeling like a loser sucks.

This ‘system’ either motivates you to participate and compete with the other wannabe winners, or it fuels a melancholy sense of being less-than. Of never measuring up. Of not being good enough. Imposter syndrome.

Sound familiar?

It might. If you believe it, statistics suggest upwards of 80% of us suffer from feeling “not good enough”. The real number of people experiencing this feeling is unknown, but I have heard from more than one therapist, counselor, or coach that it is very common to feel this way.

We cite behaviors like perfectionism, comparing ourselves to other people, over-achieving, and self-doubt as being related to feeling not good enough. I think the prevalence of these feelings has led to lots of theories and solutions of varying efficacy.

Surely these feelings of inadequacy contribute to more intense feelings of anxiety, depression, and even suicide. Some, including myself, would argue that this has become an epidemic.

And here I argue that these widespread feelings of being not good enough, in part, result from treating people like heroes who do not deserve to be. The conditions we use to define celebrities have nothing to do with heroic behavior or even decent human personality traits. We rank people based on their net worth, their financial prowess, and their ability to spend money. I’m here to tell you that any fool can spend money. And the ability to manipulate capitalistic systems to generate absurd quantities of cash isn’t heroic. I don’t even think it’s very special.

We are all people. We all have to poop. We all long for emotional connection. We all suffer from middle-of-the-night anxiety about our lives. Here I’m suggesting we not add to this mess by worshipping other people for the wrong values.

Success, as measured by accumulating power, money, or status is the wrong value. Is that how you really measure success? Is that what you want in your life?

This is the classic arrival fallacy. We think, if we just get enough ‘success’, we will be ‘happy’. It is a basic equation that could look something like this:

Look like a Kardashian + have as much money as a Musk = Success

And it’s dumb.

There’s nothing wrong with the equation, but the measures are incorrect.

Sure, maybe you do value money and measure your worth as digits in your investment accounts. Fine.

But do you even know what you value? Have you ever sat down and decided for yourself what success is?

If you go through the process of identifying your personal values. And then repeat the process 10 or 20 times you will arrive at something that is probably different from money, power, or status. Try it. I dare you.

Once you define success for yourself you will release the attachment to seeing other people’s success. Because the kind of personal values that bring real contentment, calm, curiosity, and connectedness will be different.

Meaningful success is quiet.

The upside of this is that you won’t be compelled to compare yourself with others because they don’t brag about or advertise their successes.

The downside is it is hard to find your people.

The pathway toward a better life and the ‘secret’ to all this is to identify and interact with like-minded people. Many of us have seen the fallacy that is ‘success’ and redefined the word for ourselves. I’m going out on a limb to hypothesize that the resulting list of values defining success will be fairly similar.

I will go so far as to ponder whether there is a set of ‘global values’ that can be reached with enough honest and vulnerable introspection.

That’s a community I want to be a part of. My first step on the path was to release myself from the suffering that is comparing myself to ‘successful celebrities’.

It has been quite freeing. I wish the same for you.

Then we can connect.