Your Perception of Success is Wrong. Here's A Technical Representation to Prove It

We often mix a state of being with personalities. Like being successful... Is success a personality of a person? or rather a state of a person at a given point in time. Here's a technical representation of such a model.

If you stretch a line horizontally that represents your life, there are going to be multiple points on that line that would represent being successful at something.

So technically, you are constantly being successful at something every moment of every day! If nothing, you are successfully breathing and at least not dead.

There are a lot of successes in a successful life.

Everyone is successful at something and no one is successful at everything.

It eventually comes down to how you'd define the word success. Its perceived definition has a much deeper correlation with our biological evolution. Success is the reward function of our human brain. It is something that helps us identify what's good for us and our environment plays a huge part in defining our success for every path chosen.

Success in religion, success in school, success in relationships, career, health, parenting and ultimately life. These definitions become our guiding stars pointing us to the north. We learn from our society and want to live a life of purpose

If we look at Randi Zuckerberg's pick 3 out of the Family, Friends, Work, Sleep and Fitness. I think it's generally true when you are thinking about a particular time frame in your life like when you were sitting through exams, experimenting with a startup, were in crunch time, but it is not true for the complete span of life.

You have to switch between all five to make everything work. I agree that the time frames can exponentially vary depending upon the type of person you are. In my opinion, it's always friends, family, sleep and fitness VS work. Because work is what sustains the other four elements.

It might also be because we think about growth a lot. Our mind pictures an upward graph every time we think about it. Where, if it is not about work, growth mostly means keeping the balance. For example, you don't aim to constantly lose your weight and you don't want to continuously keep increasing your sleep hours, nor do you want to spend all the time with your friends or family.

Success with these means keeping the perfect balance. But when it comes to work we mostly imagine a constantly rising graph. Which may also be the right way to think about it. Success in work just means rising graphs doesn't matter how high.

Work; Life Balance

Our life is pretty simple, just keep thing between upper and lower bounds. Work is however tricky. Honestly, If you superimpose both the graphs you can see how the work and everything else is interdependent and affects each other.

Oversimplification of a successful life

We should always keep this in our minds that we are continuously being successful in life. Success is not a singular moment. It's just our flawed understanding of the timescale of our life. Everything takes time and effort. I don't think we have to lock ourselves in a particular state of the moment and bind it to our personality.

Everyone becomes workaholic when its crunch time, you should skip fitness, sleep and tell your family you need time. When you are good, realign your sleep pattern. Start going back to the gym. Have fun with friends. Workaholic is a state or a phase, not a personality trait.

There is absolutely no need to entitle yourself to a phase and keep missing out on the fun. We are much more successful than we can see.

If you like reading it please share it too. If you have feedback, talk to me @bylal_hanif or bilalhanif.kr at gmail.com

Previously published at - https://bilalhanif.ml/successful-life-representation/


P.S:

My real-life mess distribution of a 24hr day

I made an excel sheet to see how is my day distributed, here have a look. I think I can save plenty of time if allocated in a right way but easier said than done.