“The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does”

J.M Barrie  

Picture a packed auditorium. You’ve just finished giving a speech in front of 5,000 people and they’ve all jumped from their seats to give you a standing ovation as you walk off stage with your favorite song playing in the background.

You leave the auditorium and hop onto your brand-new Ferrari car and cruise along the ocean, feeling the breeze on your face and still savoring the moment when the crowd cheered at you. As you think of you’re life you become aware of the zeros in your bank account and the top CEOs that regularly invite you to speak in their boardrooms.

You’ve made it, you are living the dream. You are a success. How sweet does that feel?

I remember when I read my first by from Tony Robbins, Awaken The Giant Within. In the introduction he describes something similar: the time when he hopped on his helicopter to leave the arena where he just held one of his events. Looking at the thousands of fans below in tears of gratitude, he reached that moment in life when he thought: I am living the dream, right now.

At that time, it made me wonder: how sweet must it feel to realize that your reality has become indistinguishable from your wildest dream?

After the curtain falls

Surely, sweet. Something worth pursuing. But then I wondered: what happens after that?

Tony Robbins’ chapter ends there. The curtain falls. Just like in the best novels: the princess and her loved one live happy ever after. Really? We’re never given the chance to see what happens behind the curtain.

When illness strikes, when the prince starts drinking more than he should, when everything slips into routine and every day feels the same, when they become elders, full of pains and memory lapses, when in the end their bodies decompose in a hospital bed, are they truly as happy as we saw them right before the curtain fell?

Or does the curtain need to fall precisely because a good story must be unrealistic? Precisely because it is a distraction from the miseries of our life? Could it be that self-help parables are nothing more than another form of entertainment to distract us from the inevitable pains of our lives?

We’ll get to those questions. Firstly, let me disclose that I believe we can fulfill many of our dreams and I believe we can live a sustainably happy life. But only by adopting a much more counterintuitive approach than mainstream self-help and conventional wisdom would advise.

Why success is hollow

Let’s go back to our opening scene. Now think of yourself on that stage again for a second. What’s really happening there?

You’re talking, sure. You’re walking along the stage. You’re breathing. You’re smiling perhaps. You’re feeling the thickness of your suite on your skin. The sensation on your thumb when you press the clicker to move to the next slide. You’re looking out at a bunch of people. And after a few hours you walk down the steps, while the crowd makes noise in excitement.

Now notice that none of the things you have done in this scenario are different from what you do in any given day of your ordinary life!

You breath, you talk, you walk, you move your hands, you move stuff, you look out your eyes and see people and crowds – especially if you take the subway or work in a busy district. Everything is the same.

The building blocks of a successful life are identical to those of an ordinary life. The reason why the scene described feels so appealing to you – compared to your daily commute to work, your regular conference calls and a crowded subway – cannot be justified by any property of physical reality itself.

Understand that there’s nothing in the physical display of things, such as you standing on a stage instead of sitting at your desk, or gesticulating in front of 5,000 people instead of in front of a mirror (your motor ability is identical), that inherently makes one situation more appealing than another.

The building blocks of a successful life are identical to those of an ordinary life

So why does virtually anyone prefer the first option and most people spend their entire lives craving for successful scenarios? It’s all about the meaning you attribute to that scenario!

Understand that meaning is something completely fabricated in your head. It’s not an inherent property of physical reality. Of course, you’ve built it through a consensus process, orchestrated by society at large. And that’s what society ultimately is: a meanings-fabrication-system run by consensus!

That’s why the prospect of driving a Ferrari along the coastline sounds so appealing. It’s not because your butts feel better physically, when seated on a Ferrari. If anything, sports cars are often much more uncomfortable and difficult to enter than the average car. It’s because of the meaning that your brain conjures up anytime you’re driving a fancy car! That’s what produces a spike in certain neurotransmitters which ultimately give you that feeling of elation. For a while.

I’m not saying that a top-notch sports car doesn’t have inherent qualities, such as beautiful design, acceleration, speed and many enjoyable features for a driver. The point is that all those qualities are such, only because your mind fabricates meanings in the first place, and attaches values to them.

Also understand that meaning – and value – is absolutely relative. In fact, if tomorrow the world was devastated by a nuclear war and riddled with famine and epidemics, all the beautiful features of a Ferrari would suddenly become meaningless to you. Likewise, if teleportation was invented, features like speed (in your Ferrari, but also in a plane or train) would entirely lose their value and become utterly meaningless to your eyes. Hence all meanings your mind constructs are always relative and therefore mutable.

It’s all about meaning… and so what?

I know this distinction may sound merely philosophical to you. But it has a strong practical implication.

If you let that idea sink in, you realize that – from a physical standpoint – no situation is particularly preferable to another, at least as long as it’s not markedly painful.

If you remove the mental meaning you attach to situations, you must agree that speaking affects your vocal cords and diaphragm whether you’re in front of two people or a thousand. Sitting causes similar impressions on your buttocks whether it’s on the seat of a Ferrari or on the bus. Typing on a keyboard and looking at a screen causes the same impressions on the nervous system, whether you’re producing a bestseller or a blog post that probably less than ten people will read.

Why is it so important to establish this? Because if the joy and excitement were caused by the physical properties of a situation, then it would make a lot of sense to chase after success.

If that was the case, once you reach the desired scenario, you’d physically upgrade your reality. Therefore, chasing success would be an extremely sound thing to do.

But as we’ve seen, the only reason why a certain scenario is appealing to you, is because of the meanings you attach to it. And that’s a huge issue, because the meanings you fabricate change all the time!

More specifically, you tend to attach a lot of meaning and greater value to the things you don’t have. While you tend to consider the things you have in abundance… well, quite meaningless.

The illusion of success and abundance

Think about the water you drink every day, the roof over your head – even if you live in a rundown shoe-box – or about your perfectly functioning lungs that allow you to breath. All those things are extremely meaningful, but no matter how hard you try to be grateful, you don’t attach much meaning or value to them, while busy in your pursuit of life goals. At least until they break or are taken from you.

And that’s exactly what happens with success. You’re meant to reach it only to understand that in the end, success is hollow.

There was nothing special on the other side all the while! Only a bunch of meanings you had fabricated. Now that the things you once desired have become familiar, your excitement is bound to be short-lived. Your meanings are rapidly re-adjusting. Speaking on big stages and driving fancy cars, suddenly falls under the conceptual category of “ordinary”. Welcome to your new normal.

It becomes ordinary as it is right now for you to drink water, drive a crappy car, surf the web in boredom and despair, while daydreaming of success. Although also this type of ‘ordinary’ is a miracle that virtually no person in the history of mankind until the last few decades ever experienced and that a few billion people can only dream of, still today!

It’s no surprise that also psychologists have eventually proven this mechanism named hedonic treadmill or adaptation. Fundamentally we always tend to return to our happiness set-point after the temporary fluctuations caused by positive or negative events.

Why is the delusion so powerful?

This article is not simply about hedonic adaptation. It’s not about the basic idea that we always raise our expectations anytime we achieve more or that we are programmed to always want more.

This is not one of those overused inspirational messages such as: “there will always be a bigger car you will want, a bigger paycheck, a better house, happiness can only be found in the now!”. Most of the time these lines are trotted out by speakers who are still living their life completely neurotically, chasing one rainbow after another…

Of course, there will always a better car that you want, or a better home and so on. You’ve experienced hedonic treadmill all your life, but has it ever stopped you from chasing more? 

Unfortunately it takes a lot more than a nice quote and a sprinkle of stage-wisdom to convince you. To make that truth sink into you at the cellular level.

That’s what this article is doing for you. We’re examining the fundamental building blocks of reality, so you can’t help but see that the writing is on the walls: success is hollow because of how reality is inherently structured.

Because it’s nothing but the result of a meaning-construction process, often built by consensus and largely influenced by mainstream culture (to make things worse).

Should I give up success?

Yes and no. After all I’ve launched a blog called Zen at Wall Street, so it’s clear that my core belief is that balance is the key in everything. Pursuing success can have healthy aspects to it, so long as you keep its illusory nature in sight.

For one, if you don’t get completely sucked into it, attainment can be a fun game. Each time you get a bit more successful and you can consciously enjoy and celebrate reaching the next level. While bearing in mind that it’s fleeting.

Also, once you’re fulfilled many of your dreams, you start to see that success alone is hollow and you can finally transcend this desire which rules over so many people’s lives.

You see, most people will only agree intellectually, but in the back of their mind the burning desire for success isn’t extinguished. And with this underlying desire, they will always carry the seeds of doubt: is it true that getting that kind of life or circumstances won’t make me happier?

Science may say so and prove it, your guru may say so, but until you taste it for yourself, it’s hard to make the insight stick!

So you can think of success like a stepladder. Imagine that you need it to reach the window and exit the room because the door is locked, but once you’ve escaped, the stepladder becomes useless.

You can view success in a similar way: once you have it, you can see it’s hollow, but at the same time you needed at least some of it to come to the realization.

A solution: success as a by-product

From what we’ve seen so far, success is hollow. It’s not good, nor bad. It just doesn’t have any substance of itself. So it can’t be a solid foundation for your life.

Hence, if you predicate your life upon achieving success and you create a whole delusional expectation around it – like most people do in modern society – you’re simply setting yourself up for misery and failure, regardless of what you get.

So my best take is: pursue success only as a by-product.

A by-product is a secondary result you get from a process. It means you don’t structure the process to specifically for it so – in your case – you don’t structure your life aiming directly at success.

Surely, there’s still things you can do so your life has more potential to create the by-product, but it should never become your primary driver.

I am scrupulous about this principle in my life too, because every time success gains prominence and starts to engulf my field of view, I notice that I create misery for myself.

So what are you going to focus on instead? Here are six healthier alternatives:

1) Pursuing significance

You connect with what’s important to you and align your life, work, and personal growth to the things that have deep significance for you. You think of your death and decide what you’d like to be remembered for, disregarding whether it’s likely to make you a billion dollars or half a cent, or whether the whole world will know your name, or only your child will remember it.

2) Pursuing beauty

You do your best to infuse everything you do with beauty. Even if nobody will ever see it but you. You add beauty to the world and you also learn to see more beauty around you. Actually, the more you create beauty and orient your life towards it, the more you can see it all around you.

3) Pursuing fun

You look for activities that bring fun into your life, but also bring the fun into every activity you do. You adopt a playful approach to life. As you grow older and society expects you to mature, your duty is – on the contrary – to set your inner child free to express himself and play more.

4) Pursuing Contribution

You focus on adding value. And you learn to do the most difficult thing: adding value while dropping all expectations of something in return. You choose to focus on always contributing something, on doing things that add value to someone or some situation at all times.

Also read: The only reason you’re stuck in your life and career

5) Pursuing a better relationship with the present moment

You understand that if there’s nothing on the other side of success, there’s no point resisting your present moment experience so much. It’s insane. It’s all you have and so you commit to developing a healthy relationship with it as your number one priority

Also read: Why you present experience sucks: the magic under your nose that you cannot see

6) Pursuing consciousness growth

You pursue a deeper understand of yourself and reality. You always seek to grow for the sake of growing, even when the world doesn’t recognize it and even when your growth makes you feel lonelier. You focus on growing yourself as an individual even when this doesn’t align with society’s rewards

Also read: Understanding the real purpose of your career

Remember that if success is hollow, devoting your life to one (or all) of these six paths will surely fill that void in your life.

Also published on Medium.