Success Is Not An Achievement

I wrote this for myself, but I'm sharing it anyway. It's been on my mind constantly and connected to everything, even if it doesn't fit neatly with what I usually post here. Worth documenting where I am right now.

A week off of automations, and business, and the like. Just thinking about life here.

Success is not a point in time where I do a set of actions and achieve it.

Success is a constant state of being. I could have been successful in the past and be successful in the future, but unsuccessful in the moment I am thinking about my past success and visualizing my future success.

If I am doing that, I’m likely in a state of being that is unsuccessful, as I’m searching for success. If I am searching for success, I do not currently have it, making me unsuccessful despite all the past success I might have had.

At each point in my life, I am different than I was at previous times. External experiences change my internal world, and my internal world changes how I experience the external world. Because there is so much entropy in the external world, so much randomness and chaos, things are constantly shifting both around me and within me.

Each new self has different attributes than the previous self. Each new self can be successful or unsuccessful. It’s a state of being.

So how do I be successful? Well, primarily it is aligning my actions with my thoughts. This is what I call integrity, being who I say I am. When I am not doing what I tell myself I need to do or being the person I tell myself I am, I do not look at myself as successful, despite past successes I might have. This is different from achievement, which is just the external outcome. I can achieve things and still feel unsuccessful if I compromised my integrity along the way.

I think both success and “unsuccess” compound. They compound as the mindset of each shapes the internal world of the person I become in the future. The greater the string of successes, the stronger the feeling of being successful. When I complete a string of actions I played out in my mind to achieve a future goal I set for myself, that is success. I think commonly people would just think the achievement of the goal is success, but I’d argue it’s aligning my words with my actions the entire way up to achieving that goal.

For example, if my goal were to lose 20 pounds over the next 2 months by never being hungover, eating healthy, and working out every day, I could achieve that goal (the achievement), but I also could have 2-3 days where I “cheated.” On these days I felt unsuccessful because my actions didn’t align with my thoughts, I lacked integrity. This guilt comes because I realize I’m not who I said I was going to be.

I think it is important to acknowledge the guilt and leave the unsuccess in the past. Do not let it compound. If I let it compound, then I do not achieve future goals, leading to an unsuccessful state of being.

Something that hit me recently is that from this moment forward, whenever “this moment” is, I can be successful. I do not have to wait to become successful.

To start, it’s setting out a goal or goals and how to achieve those goals. The key is to make it attainable, as there is only so much time in the day to match my actions to my thoughts. Thoughts do not abide by the time constraints in the external world like actions do. If I try to cheat Father Time, I will end up being unsuccessful.

Because of the entropy in the external world, things will always happen that change my state of being to unsuccessful. As long as I can be present enough to acknowledge that these things did not happen because of a misalignment of my internal world with the external world, and instead it was due to the natural chaos of the external world, then I can be successful in that moment.

To this end, I think success plays a huge role in happiness. If I can objectively look at my thoughts and say “yeah, they match my actions,” I am aligned and likely happy because of it.

People who embody what they tell themselves they are, those are the happy ones. This state of being, this constant integrity between thought and action, is what success really is. It’s not some distant achievement, but a way of living in each present moment.

Thanks for reading,

James