How to be Successful even if Success Never Comes (1of2)
While not everyone can be a Great Man, you can always be the Superior Man.
The greatest, most successful, most renowned conqueror the world had ever known lay on his deathbed. Alexander the Great was deteriorating. He had destroyed his body through years of hard partying and harder battles. Fearing the worst, his subjects needed to know who his replacement would be. “The strongest,” said Alexander, guaranteeing that the men who had sacrificed so much to build his empire were now pitted against each other to tear it asunder while determining who deserved that title.
Viewed in hindsight, you can’t help but see his final utterance as a spiteful one. A bitter F-You from someone who, despite achieving more glory, attaining more wealth, and building a greater legacy than 99.9% of those who came before him, was never satisfied. By every metric but his own, Alexander was a successful man, but by his own standard, his life was a failure. If the guy who had everything most of us could ever want—fame, wealth, attractive members of both sexes, the world’s most powerful military at your beck and call—was still spiteful, bitter, and dissatisfied, then what hope could those of us “whom the gods do not favor” have to be happy?
Today, we don’t even give people the moniker of “The Great” anymore. Beginning around Tolstoy’s publication of War and Peace in 1869, the idea that individuals drove world events, the “Great Man” theory of history, gradually became replaced by Herbert Spencer’s criticism that most so-called great ones are mere “products of their social environment”, whom Tolstoy referred to as history’s slaves. It’s a view that jives more with our modern, trends-obsessed outlook. The people chosen for greatness didn’t will their greatness into existence, they’re merely the byproducts of whatever trends and currents happen to lift them into the limelight.
Had Macedon not been close enough to Greece to steal and refine the hoplite infantry techniques of its Hellenic neighbors, then Alexander would not have been Great. Had the French Revolution never happened, Napoleon would probably have become a minor Corsican terrorist. Had oil never been discovered, then John D. Rockefeller Sr. might have remained a merchant in the grocery warehousing business. If tech hadn’t engulfed the world, maybe Steve Jobs would be remembered as a hippie who dropped acid and ate a lot of fruit.
The fact that our modern-day heroes are tech industrialists could not have been predicted by the home-brew computer fanatics of the 1970s. Instead, there are obsessives in every field, and it’s an infinite number of coincidental factors that decide who becomes “successful”.
In other words, no matter how hard or smart we work, no matter where we follow our passions, or how much we sacrifice to make room for luck, luck could still stand us up. If we picked the wrong pursuit, or even if we pick the right one at the wrong time, we may end up with a life spent toiling in obscurity. With so many unhappy-yet-easier jobs out there, it’s no wonder most of us settle!
Meanwhile, the pre-modern Chinese didn’t quite take the same view. Instead of an either/or attitude towards the Great Man debate, Chinese historians were pragmatists. They worked with more honest source materials as court records were sealed from imperial eyes, and emperors generally did not try to rewrite their own records. The court historians, meanwhile, got a closeup view of the politics of their day and realized something historians without direct access to their subject matter did not: that everyone more or less ended up in the positions they were in because of so highly complex a confluence of events that it may as well have been mandated by heaven.
Still, it could not be denied that the actions of the emperor and those around him mattered. There was clearly a standard of behavior which, if adhered to, gave the empire its greatest chance of survival during bleak times and extended prosperity during times of plenty. You don’t watch dynasties come and go for thousands of years without seeing how things go wrong despite the best people’s efforts, and how much worse bad people can screw things up. Indeed, Chinese history is full of tyrants who ended dynasties prematurely with their excesses, and virtuous sovereigns who extended dynasties through their principled rule. But even emperors don’t get to choose what kind of kingdom they get to inherit, and all must play the hands they’re dealt.
The pre-modern Chinese belief that some things are out of everyone’s control extended into the culture’s myths and folklore. In the Journey to the West, a mythopoetic retelling of one Tang Dynasty monk’s voyage to retrieve Buddhist scriptures from India, many of the ills that befall our main characters are due not to some great evildoer, but the negligence of one divine bureaucrat or another. Suggesting a truth of reality perhaps more frightening than the certainty of sin and eternal damnation:
Even gods are fallible.
At other times, misfortunes are deliberately placed in the protagonists’ path to refine their character and develop their spirit. The adventurers who set out to attain the true word of Buddha, like so many of us who embark on our own life quests, aren’t yet ready to receive them. This partially explains why the entire journey took over ten years when caravans between China and India took a fraction as long. It is only after the trials and tribulations that befall our heroes on the journey westward that they become worthy of the word. Only by growth through hardship are they capable of explaining the truth to the people.
Whether their misfortunes are by design or accident, by their own actions in a previous life or the actions of others, doesn’t matter. Everyone gets tested. The difference between the person who goes to bed happy once the tests are over and the one who ends their day in misery lies in how they deal with them. The answer should not be “success or bust”, but to become the kind of person worthy of success.
Such a person was deemed by the Ancient Chinese to be a “Superior Man”.
And they got that way by training their virtues as rigorously as any martial artist.
They seek not to best the world but to best their past and present selves.
They practice acting according to what they say.
They worry about the ways they are limited, and not about whether people recognize the ways they are better.
Unlike a “Great Man” whose force of will can bend reality and shape the world according to his desires, a Superior Man is someone whose superiority comes from having superior character.
Such a path may not guarantee material success, no path does.
But it will teach you how to handle it.
And it will teach you how to handle not getting it.
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More next week, but thank you for reading this far. For those who are interested in the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, I and my friend, James Young, host a podcast where we break down the book chapter by chapter and analyze the antics of China’s most famous monkey. It’s available wherever you get your podcasts, as well as at http://journeytothewestcast.com/
Good and thoughtful post, as always.