Who Wins at Life?
I received that exact question in my inbox this morning, courtesy of Quora. The most popular answer submitted left me disappointed. You don’t just become “an outlier, creative, self-confident, exceptional,” etc. These are results. It’s circular, and it’s the only answer I’ve seen online to this question, which I linked above and then Googled. Even worse, much of it is externally focused. What is it to be “exceptional”? Why would one ever let society even tell you what this means?
So let me take my best stab at this, from 50 years on this planet and from the last 10 focused on what really matters and how I got to a much better place. And then I’d suggest you come up with your own list. “How do I define winning in life, and how close am I to it?” would be a great way to self-reflect and measure where you have come from and where you are heading. Build your own roadmap, but here is mine.
Who Wins at Life?
You have found internal, unconditional self-esteem. The greatest step I ever took in life was to look inward. Really look inward. Jean-Luc Godard said, “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” Unconditional esteem is incredibly rare in the 24/7 evaluative society we live in. But when you find it, so much of the stress and drama of life will melt away. You will stop caring (or in my case, care a bit less) about your performance relative to others, you will stop caring about rejection and what others think about you, and you will stop caring about materialistic values and judgments on how successful you are. At the highest moments of unconditional esteem, I find complete peace. The universe has put me here for a reason, no better or worse than you. But I am here, and I matter. Not because of what I have done or will do. I simply belong. It is the most blissful and liberating thing I know — to feel this way.
You measure success differently. It isn’t “what have I done in life?” — those are accomplishments — but rather “am I still passionate about what I am doing?” If you are, you are winning in life. Having a passion, a higher calling, drowns out all the background noise, the criticism and self-doubts. It is a perpetual generator of energy and positive feelings. To chase your passions, not to mimic those of others but to find your own, is just another form of evolved self-awareness.
You prioritize yourself first. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? In many ways we are taught the opposite — to put the needs of others before our own. What I have found is that often the most distraught people always put others before them, and ultimately become incapable of taking care of both other people and themselves. If you love yourself, if you constantly seek to improve yourself, you will be so much more capable of helping others too.
You embrace a growth mindset. Much of this comes from the work of Dr. Carol Dweck, who at 75 is still going strong teaching in the psychology department at Stanford University. Those with a growth mindset:
Embrace challenges
Learn from failures (my favorite)
Are inspired by the success of others
The opposite approach is to think you were born statically with no room to evolve or improve, to feel defeated by failure, and to be threatened by the success of others. Which life sounds better to you? I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
You live in the present. This doesn’t mean you don’t dream of a better future or reminisce about fond memories of the past. I do both and enjoy both. Heck, I enjoy revisiting my failures of the past too; it can be a great way to learn. But life is incredibly short — and more so now, in a sense, than ever before, because we have more tools to escape the present (smart phones, social media, self-medicative substances) that are more potent and available than ever before. When you focus on the moment, truly living and being present in the moment, life slows down a great deal. It becomes less stressful, and each day more fulfilling. Here is a quote from the philosopher Seneca, said nearly 2,000 years ago:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Deep down inside you, you know how to live your best life. You know what winning means to you. The question I glanced at this morning, “who wins at life,” was a gift, because it made me stop to think about what my definition of that really means. I hope you do the same.
– Mike
We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.