So much for success

What if winning were easy?

A most Devilish misnomer.

I am laughing as I write this. Well, more like making a face similar to Mr. Yuk.

Success is a word like another I recently addressed: confidence.

It often serves as a pinnacle or mountaintop to surmount. Plant a flag in, Moon Landing style, wind in your hair, done for the day, fear and trip ups long behind and bliss for the taking.

These words are not stagnant, but dynamic relationship signifiers of things like courage, empathy, acceptance, evaluation, growth, expansion, maturation, and survival. Those terms are words of discourse and dialogue. Terms of infinity vs linear mortality.

Now success: that is a term 100% about death. How? Because it does not allow any insight nor answer to this: “What happens now?” There is actually nothing that happens once you have success, right? That is it: You just cook there until you are done, in the ground or in flames and the worms have their way.

Also, what’s really interesting about success is that it is rarely considered an emotional thermometer. For instance: This week I have felt WILDLY unsuccessful, just as I pen this, in fact. Why? Well, I don’t completely know. It is a lot of things, really, including:

1) My face is looking terribly old and skeletal

2) I had no less than three days where I arrived at the office and realized I looked terrible – bad outfit, awful hair, face smeared with lipstick I swore was straight when I left the house. Before me a day of client sessions where both my community and my angry self are sentenced to seeing the horror of my appearance, hour after unrelenting hour.

3) Previous weeks were filled with referrals, new client sign ups, OG folx expanding their packages, and this week nada. Legit crickets. (This is obviously because I look so terrible – you can tell me.)

4) Winter is emotionally tricky for me. My health makes it nearly impossible to regulate my body temperature. Add to that, temps are in my bones and heart, breathing gets tricky, pain keeps me up at night, and tummy cramps come like flocks of wrens across my guttural skies.

5) Family stuff – just family stuff

6) The more I think about feeling badly about things, the more I tend to. Peer pressure from the worst pusher out there.

Wow, my experience of success is super vulnerable, huh? Light and flighty. Really naked and open, an emotion who licks her finger and sticks it into the wind of perception and acts accordingly. That is certainly no way to protect oneself and extremely exhausting, to boot.

Another chink in successes armor is the economy and capitalism. Numbers change with the times, I need not tell anyone circa February 2021 that, right? Thus, what might smell of sweet professional revelry sticks as the market turns.

If and as you are likely exhausted on the success definition detractors – I shall present only one more: manipulation. When we are challenged to success, define it many times too, aim for it, access it – we are being manipulated. Manipulated into buying - wouldn’t you know? For if asked if we wish to be, are or are not, state how or why we are not (a/k/a the hacker’s signature assumption of failure) searching for an in-the-moment answer is the first hole in the damn of self-actualization. Weaker for thinking on our “success”, the seller moves in for the slaughter. Defensive buyers balk, needy ones bow, and those in the middle can go either way, and all leave the exchange changed and questioning. Questioning NOT in inquiry, but in doubt. Bottomless, incurable, contagious doubt.

Doubt by-the-by is a poltergeist. Birthed of the most chaotic energies, sticking like Velcro, knocking things off the shelves of our inner houses, flickering lights, creating cold spots, and creeping hairs on the back of the necks of our every encounter and action.

Very normal in the pantheon of human experience is doubt, completely acceptable and alone, powerless. Yet when trapped in a dialogue about rotten terms of who or what success is – poison.

So, what is to be done? Success as an aim and a word is not like “Blue-Ray”: about to be nixed from the vernacular anytime soon nor far.

Here is what: kick it in the knees. Take out its shoelaces. Put glass in its mash potatoes. Flypaper under the assigned seat of success to keep the term set and safe, albeit angry, in the rightful place of weak and binary vocabulary.

Were you recently approached by an outright question of if you were or are successful? Encouraged to try something to fix the fact that you are not? Offered a way to be?

Alone, that is very OK and perhaps even clean, honest and earnest. Helping can come open-handed in the most awkward ways for sure. Thus, I am not telling you “no” nor “run”; what I am saying is – be careful. Wary to seeking to plod towards so straightforwardly towards something so specific and generalized and as complex as achievement.

A great way to practice positive scrutiny is and can be this: think about a time that is not right now. When was the last time a person who is not you, not a pal, family member, lover, a stranger or colleague basically a body with no skin in your self-esteem game - made a surprise complementary observation about your work or person? How did that feel?

Think of a time when you got paid for a thing you did by an individual or entity you wanted to impress, hook, gain commitment from. Even if that bankroll or gig is long gone. Even if the way it shook out was not awesome – who cares? What I want is the moment – the high of a win.

Now return to the question about being/not being/wanting/gaining success and think: You and achievement are already in a very healthy relationship. Sometimes in relationships, our fellows don’t always come home as speedily as we wish they would. They dawdle and forget to call, but they are still there. Winning and reliable some moments and massively absent in others. But you know what, so are we as equally fickle.

Success in its many shades lives in your back pocket or just behind your earlobe: scratchable and accessible and never really going anywhere if you seek to pull it out or scratch it. Happy days and paychecks come and do not; that unhinges experiences of success but only very momentarily. Moments, for sure, can be terminally long. Doing this – as I am going to try in a week when I hope my esteem is less heavy – allows as much focus to the good hair days as to the shitty. Invite levity in boom times with as much welcome as the doldrums are encouraged when the internal evaluation lights are dimmer.

Ok reader, can we do it? Can we take on a new week in a new way? See our old faces and baggage, talents, and best intentions in a fresh way? Try for curiosity vs history? Ask that merciless miser to hold her serpent tongue?

Despondence has a bark A LOT bigger than there a bite – that is a promise! Let us ignore the snarls and lies of “universal” success assumptions and take on something really insane – aiming for what works of each of us individually.