Meditations on Success and Flourishing

In 2018, as I was graduating from my psychiatry residency, there was a lot I wanted from my professional life and I was unsure of how to evaluate my own ambitions. I wrote the following text at the time as a way of reminding myself what was important to me. These thoughts are neither particularly original nor truly novel, but they are pieces of self-advice that were valuable to me on an uncertain path.

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The culture of academic medicine places great emphasis on professional success. We’re encouraged to think of success as something depersonalized and objective, something we can see on a CV and quantify. We’re offered various benchmarks of achievement, such as obtaining an R01 grant, having a high h-index, and being a tenured professor. There’s a tendency for us to see such standards as possessing intrinsic value, as being desirable for themselves, and we spend our lives chasing the targets that are presented to us. I’m keenly aware of this mindset as well as its dark side. As I see it, the question is deeply moral and relates to our assessment of the highest goods in life.

Virtue ethics, a tradition rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, encourages us to think about life through concepts like eudaimonia (flourishing), euzên (living well), and aretê (excellence, or realizing one's full potential). Virtues are dispositions or habits that are carefully, consciously, and rationally cultivated to help us achieve eudaimonia. Doing so imbues our everyday life with moral significance. We wish to live well not because living well would help us accomplish some other goal (such as being a tenured professor), but because living well is the ultimate goal. The social narratives and yardsticks of academic success are valuable to the extent to which they enable us to achieve eudaimonia. In the right setting, in the right way, they can, and they do. But it is often the case that if these touchstones of success are pursued as being desirable for themselves, we will sacrifice eudaimonia in the process and end up with a hollow victory. To borrow words from Emrys Westacott, in so far as we fail to cultivate and exercise virtues—wisdom, curiosity, intellect, aesthetic sensitivity, compassion, empathy, generosity—we fail to exemplify human flourishing.

Invest in a community of colleagues and friends because no one succeeds alone. And even if you somehow do, what meaning does success have in a vacuum?

If you value success for the sake of success, it will never be enough—there will never be enough awards, presentations, and publications. These are barren achievements by themselves. Kept in the solitude of one’s CV, they are meaningless, a collector’s obsession. Success needs to be contextualized in the larger narrative of our higher values. It becomes meaningful in the context of one’s relationship with a community, a community that one has contributed to and a community that takes pride in one’s achievements.

The good life can take many forms. In an essay on regret, Jonathan Malesic imagines meeting his younger self: “I tell him it’s possible to have an intellectual life without being in academia . . . He won’t lose his identity if he pursues something else . . . I tell him to be more confident in his ability to find a pathway outside academia, which, if he’s honest, is the only version of the good life he’s ever seen.” We could all do with more self-honesty. The good life is created but it is also partly discovered, for we cannot flourish without some measure of self-knowledge.

Be wary of the psychological costs of empty ambition

Professional success and personal happiness do not have to be a zero-sum game, but success pursued blindly often is. Healthy ambition is tempered by other values in the context of meaningful life goals. We must be wary of paths to professional success that are littered with oppressive loneliness, alienation, apprehension, and self-indulgent greed. Flourishing will not be found in successful drudgery but in intellectually stimulating and fulfilling work that urges us to be our best selves. Furthermore, our flourishing depends not only on the goals we set for ourselves and on what we desire, but also on our constitution, temperament, and psychological needs. Desires and needs do not always align. If I desire something that I can only achieve with enormous psychic strain, it is likely that it may not bring me any peace even if I achieve it. The virtues that drive us to seek an academic life—curiosity, wisdom, intellect, knowledge, intellectual courage—are not restricted to it.

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough... Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.” (David Foster Wallace)

“This is the great irony about ambition. If you wish to be smarter and more successful than everybody else, you will always feel like a failure. If you wish to be the most loved and most popular, then you will always feel alone. If you wish to be the most powerful and admired, then you will always feel weak and impotent.” (Mark Manson)

Be radically honest with yourself, and seek honesty in relationship with others

The realities that are hardest to bear are often the realities of our inner lives. If my experience with psychotherapy as a trainee has taught me one thing, it is our need to be honest with ourselves. We all have aspects of us that are dark, shameful, or embarrassing, and they would be frowned upon by society if they were ever to be revealed. Yet we do great damage by refusing to acknowledge these fragments of our psychological lives. We should extend our hidden selves the same non-judgmental understanding and compassion we extend to our patients. We cannot run from ourselves without great cost.

Those who have achieved some degree of self-honesty will understand the frustrated recognition of how emotionally constricted most of our social relationships are. Ethical considerations are valid restraints to self-expression, but social prejudice and mindless etiquette should not be. Seek honesty in friendships the same way you seek honesty in your relationship with yourself. It is better to have fewer, deeper friendships than to have many, superficial ones.     

Approach your opinions with a measure of humility

A body of research literature in psychology has revealed that intelligence is no refuge against cognitive biases. For instance, the magnitude of myside bias shows very little relationship to intelligence. It is easy to identify biased thinking and behaviors in others, but we are largely unaware of our own biases (bias blind spot). Not only does higher intellect fail to attenuate this, a higher cognitive ability may even be associated with a larger bias blind spot.

This highlights to me the need for immense humility: we need to be incessantly mindful of our own vulnerability to self-deception. In other words, don’t take yourself too seriously.

Be charitable to your fellow sufferers

We are all damaged, even the best of us. The facts of life have tarnished us.

“... the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Accept the inevitability of failure and loss

Success is never guaranteed, even to those who may deserve it the most. And certainly, even the successful do not always succeed in everything they do. Accept that no matter how intelligent, powerful, or resourceful you are, you will fail at one point or another. 

Life is fragile, and we are all helpless in the face of entropy of existence. There is no escaping loss. How we respond to pain and evil in our lives and how it impacts our character is of moral significance. Confronted with suffering, we can transform ourselves for the better, with hope and courage, and by cultivating compassion, humility, and sensitivity—instead of allowing it to turn us into bitter, base and vengeful creatures.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross)

Be curious and make connections; ‘have free affections and wide interests.’ Choose to grow. Be inspired by giants; hope to stand on their shoulders.

Curiosity is a remarkably under-valued virtue. The world is incredibly vast and unbelievably complex, and it deserves to be approached with curiosity and awe. There is intrinsic value in our attempts to understand this existence. Ask questions, seek out answers. Be curious about yourself, and be curious about others; take delight in the discoveries of shared curiosity.   

“The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others.” (Bertrand Russell)

We are imperfect creatures, and there is always room for more growth: personally, professionally, morally, emotionally, artistically, intellectually… meaningful success is rarely achieved by staying within one’s comfort zone.

Seek solace in our finitude

Wisdom is in making peace with our finitude in a potentially infinite world (“All of us are creatures of a day” – Marcus Aurelius) and in finding meaning in the pleasures that come our way, in being our better selves, and in generative concerns to leave this world a better place, even though this world will eventually forget us.

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The piece above combines elements from two posts, one from my personal blog and one from CLOSLER.

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