Your Journey, Your Success: A Different Take on Achievement

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Journey Movement podcast. This episode was inspired because of a conversation that I had with a dear friend recently and because of that conversation today I want to talk about the difference between how the world defines success and how the journey defines success, because they're actually pretty different and I think this applies to a lot of different things in our lives. But today I'm going to start by using education as an example, specifically my education. Many of you know that I'm a teacher and I have been for over 20 years, and this is something that I see in education all of the time. But it wasn't until I learned about journeys that I realized why it's so damaging and why it's so important that we don't fall for the success trap.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Let me start by telling you about me as a student. I was honestly one of those people for whom school actually worked pretty well. I kind of got the game of school, if you want to put it that way. I love learning anyway. Even now, I'm always learning something, so being able to learn new things was always really appealing to me. But in addition to that, I got the rules, I understood the moves I needed to make and overall, my scholastic experience would be considered a success. I got good grades, I received scholarships that helped to pay for my schooling and I got a job, ultimately doing something that I love. However, there's maybe a little bit more to this story, because if you had asked me at the time if I felt successful, the answer would have been no. Even though on paper it would seem like I was successful, I didn't experience it that way.

Speaker 1: 1:45

So we're going to pause here for just a second to talk about what success actually means. If you go to the dictionary definition of success, you'll find phrases like the accomplishment of an aim or a purpose. In other words, there's something that you wanted and you accomplished that thing. That is success. However, there has been a very subtle insertion, like an unspoken part of the definition, if you will, that has tainted how we experience success in our society at large. The message that we get is that success isn't just the accomplishment of any aim or purpose. Success is the accomplishment of very specific aims and purposes Achieving fame, wealth, social status or acceptance and I actually have to laugh at this, because when I ask my kids if they need anything from the grocery store when I go on Saturdays. I have a couple of kids that will always say money, power, fame. So even there it's leaked in, and I think it's a good opportunity to check in with ourselves and see how successful we feel.

Speaker 1: 2:54

And I think here, right now, as you look at your life, do you feel successful? And if you do feel successful, why do you feel that way? And if not, why not Now? If you had asked me before if I judged success by these very narrow parameters, I would have said, of course not. I see people all around me that I would consider successful that don't necessarily have any of those things.

Speaker 1: 3:22

However, through the years, when I checked in with myself to see if I felt successful, those were the things that I judged my own success by. If people didn't acknowledge my accomplishments, if I didn't have a lot of money, if I didn't have the right body or looks or interests to be socially accepted, then I didn't feel successful. The aims and purposes that I had accomplished didn't seem to matter that much. In fact, I still brush those off in many ways when I talk to people feeling like they really aren't a big deal compared to the success in quotes that we have been subconsciously trained to look for in an even more obstructed way of thinking. Sometimes we look at the fame and the wealth and the social status and the acceptability as an indication of who the person is, maybe that they have more value as a person because of those types of successes, regardless of how they came by them, and that if we don't have the same success, we are somehow then fundamentally less valuable, less lovable, less acceptable. We spend a whole lot of time feeling like we aren't successful, labeling ourselves as failures, as unworthy, ignoring the true successes that we actually have. And that, my friends, is where we need to pause and look at the thought process, because, you see, when it comes to journeys, fame, wealth, success of the worldly kind those things don't matter. If these measures of success come into someone's journey, they are side notes at best. That's because journeys are about us becoming the best version of ourselves. Fame and wealth and social status and acceptance only matter if they are a part of us becoming this best version. The journey happens equally to everyone, to rich and poor, famous, unknown, socially acceptable or not. Clearly, the journey doesn't differentiate based on those factors. And the even more difficult reality is that for success to occur in the journey, it has nothing to do with the achievement of something. It has everything to do with being capable of achieving that something, and there's some nuance there.

Speaker 1: 5:36

So let's go back to me as an example. I remember very vividly sitting in the testing center at BYU, where I went to college, and looking at a test that I was about to take. After answering the first I don't know one or two questions, I scanned through the rest of the test and came to a striking realization I was going to ace this test. I mean ace it and that seems like a good thing, but in one of those powerfully destructive moments of journey level understanding, I could see that I wasn't going to ace it because I knew the content. I was going to ace it because I'm a really good test taker and the writer of the test was a terrible test writer and I in fact aced the test. But I walked out of there knowing that it wasn't because of what I knew or what I had learned or what I was now capable of doing in regards to that content area. It was because I knew how to read a test.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Now, for some, acing the test would seem like a success because there's an emphasis on grades in education, just like there's an emphasis on wealth and fame, as though grades are some indication of what I'm capable of doing. But in that class it wasn't true. I succeeded at this external, superficial standard of success, but I failed at the actual standard. I wasn't capable, and I've seen this in schools over and over not just schools, but we'll focus on this for a moment. Kids will take a test. They get a question right, but they may have no idea how or why they got it right, and if you ask them, many of them can't predictably replicate that answer. So the actual learning, the actual growth, the actual change towards this better version of ourselves hasn't occurred. But we act like the correct answer is the point, regardless of how the student got there. No one follows up when students get questions right. We only follow up if they get them wrong.

Speaker 1: 7:47

Now to society. A good grade means that we're done, regardless of what we know or what we don't know. This happens in jobs as well. We get a promotion or we get a lot of money To the journey. If we don't know it, the journey isn't done. Success only comes as we go through the process, as we make the changes, as we become capable. Then the grades or the championship or the promotion, they don't really matter, because we get to take that capability with us, regardless of the outcome. Teams who lose championships still have all the things that they've learned and they get to take those things with them. People who apply for jobs but don't get them are still capable of getting other jobs, and I hope that makes sense, because really that's the point. The actual outcome is secondary. Becoming capable is what matters most.

Speaker 1: 8:46

So what is the ideal that I'm suggesting, then? That we question every single right answer as well as all the wrong answers? Of course not. That is way too labor intensive and teachers are already stressed. But I do think it would behoove us to check in on occasion to see if students or employees or players can talk us through what they're thinking, how they came to the conclusions that they did, how they see situations, what they take into account all of those things, because I think those conversations would be illuminating. But even more than that, maybe we can start shifting the focus of these superficial measurements of success and actually get to the deeper, more lasting indications of actual change and learning and growth.

Speaker 1: 9:34

I was talking to a colleague of mine about this idea of success and excellence, and it was a really fascinating conversation about how we measure and define those two words, success and excellence and as we were talking, it occurred to me that, in one way, these two words embodied the point I'm trying to make really well. You see, the major shift that would need to happen is that we start to emphasize outcomes that you can't cheat to achieve. You can cheat your way to good grades People do it all the time you can even cheat your way to a championship. You can cheat your way to a promotion. You can cheat your way to fame and wealth and social status, and that's where I see the difference between success and excellence.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Success is something that you can, according to current measure, cheat to get. Excellence, however, is something that you can't cheat to get. It takes work and practice. Letting go. Things that journeys provide result in excellence, and in many ways, it's the difference between doing and being. I can do things that I don't have any way to know that I could actually do that thing again, but if I am something well, that's different Then being that is the default, at least until I change it through a journey. So I think it's helpful for us to consider, first of all, how are we measuring success?

Speaker 1: 11:06

Let's go back to the question as to whether or not you feel like you're a success. What do you consider to be successful, and why? Is that your definition of success? Is it something that is a success but you may not be able to replicate that action? Has your definition of success become a block to be able to feel good about where you are and what you can do? What can you learn from the things that are going well that could maybe help inform other parts of your life? And, equally important to consider what are you excellent at? That it's time to own. I guarantee there are things about you, things that come naturally to you right now, that you excel at. Whether it's because you worked really hard at it or because it's your natural disposition, you are excellent in that thing. So how can you tune into that, learn from that, apply those lessons to other parts of your life, not just for the current journey that you may be on, but to help others on their journeys.

Speaker 1: 12:07

I worked for a company that had huge success at one point with a specific product launch. By success in this case, I mean financial success. They made a lot of money, so they unsurprisingly decided to do the same launch the next year and the next and the next, but what I observed was that it became increasingly difficult to achieve that same level of success every year, and in fact, they weren't ever able to replicate what had happened in their most successful year. Not that what they did was wrong, but they had achieved a success that they didn't quite understand. They succeeded, but in spite of what they thought, it apparently wasn't for the reasons that they had previously considered. As they tried to do the same types of things, they got diminishing returns, and this happens for us as well. We see something go well. This could be business related, or health related, or relationship related, whatever it is and we think we know why it succeeded. But if we notice that doing those same things isn't having the same results, it's possible that we haven't yet identified the actual reason that it succeeded in the first place.

Speaker 1: 13:16

If you're noticing diminishing returns, it's time to step back and reevaluate. There's so much to think about when we try to do the same action over and over and expect it to succeed. We see this in business, we see this in weight loss, we see it in education the idea that we can keep doing the same thing over and over and get the same results is ignoring a lot of different factors. What worked in one situation may not work in another. The thing that you said at that one time, when your spouse was exhausted and stressed and things were loud and all of a sudden it made everything better, may not work when they've slept well or they aren't stressed.

Speaker 1: 13:54

So keep in mind the context when you're evaluating success and also keep in mind that what worked for someone else may not work for you. Just because someone had a lot of success using a particular business strategy, for example, it doesn't mean that that strategy will be successful for you. Or just because someone found success with a particular weight loss strategy, that doesn't mean it will work for you. That doesn't mean it won't work either, but we have to be aware of that expectation. You are not that person. You are not selling exactly what they are or trying to change the same behaviors that they were trying to change. What comes naturally for them may not be what comes naturally for you. You are trying at a different time and in a different place and in a different way. There are so many variables.

Speaker 1: 14:42

We spoke about this in an earlier episode about trying to live someone else's journey. We need to come back and focus on our journey as a way to tell what's working and what isn't, not comparing our journey and our tools to someone else's, because, for the journey, instead of looking ahead of us to where we aren't yet, or to the side where we see everybody else and how far they've gone, the journey actually encourages us to look behind us to measure success. How far have you come? How different are you today than you were in the past? Do you have moments where you realize that an older version of you would have blown off the handle in this situation, and now you're able to be more calm? Or do you find yourself doing something effortlessly that used to be incredibly difficult? The journey wants us to be in the energy of momentum, and we can only do that by looking at how far we've come.

Speaker 1: 15:43

I guess, in the end, we get to decide what success means to us and what excellence means to us, and where we want to apply those ideas. Do you have to be excellent at everything you do? Only if you want to Do you need to stop chasing financial or social success. Only if you want to. Regardless, the journey will be there to help you move to that better version of yourself, often in spite of what we want or plan For me in this moment since it will probably change I want to be able to measure success in a way that doesn't lead to self-loathing if things don't work out, and there are things that I truly want to be excellent at and therefore I can work on being open to the process that it will take to become excellent.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Those are the experiences I choose to have, that I know I will learn from, and being willing to step across those thresholds. Maybe the action that changes everything, and maybe, just maybe, that's what success can be. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget life is a journey. It's time to start living like it. We'll see you next time.