In summary, what are your thoughts on what it takes to be successful?

[Anomalocaris]

I confess I find this list surprising.

Twitter is a unique environment and has its own idiosyncrasies for becoming popular. You could easily judge the success of a person's efforts to become Twitter-famous. But there are people who by most reasonable measures are successful people, yet have few followers. 

For example, I follow a guy who is pretty much top of his field in an obscure academic specialty. He speaks five or six languages, travels to all kinds of interesting places, and publishes new findings regularly. He also lives in a very beautiful Italian town. He gets paid for all this. Yet he has fewer than 500 Twitter followers. Whereas someone like Jimin -- a popular K-pop star -- has close to 400,000. I'm not faulting Jimin -- I'm sure he works hard at what he does. But is it really fair to say that he's 1000 times more successful than the academic I described? 

Twitter followers would be a method of quantifying success, I suppose, but I am skeptical that success can be quantified. And since Twitter is a notorious time-waster, not being on it at all might help with a person's success.

Material wealth seems to be what people here think of when they hear the word "success." I hope on reflection people can think of other ways to be successful.

As for physical strength, this strikes me as a mark of success only if one aims for it. There are plenty of people who are great at what they do who are not particularly strong in this way. Was Einstein physically strong? If not, was he a failure?

Beauty in women is largely good luck, and I can think of any number of successful women who didn't care about it. For example Iris Murdoch was a wonderful novelist and philosopher, but never cared at all about her appearance, cut her own hair, and dressed like a homeless woman. She also had lots of lovers, so apparently there are people out there who don't judge attractiveness simply by appearance. 

The acquisition of skills and having friends do seem more like attributes of success to me.

Maybe the qualities you list are things that appeal to you -- that you would find attractive -- but I'm not sure yet that they are all reasonable measures of success.

I have lived in a world where you were valued for your physical abilities (as a man) and women were valued more by virtue of being physically beautiful. I have also lived in a world where you are judged by your bank account. It is fair to say that my own values are different from others, but what else is there? Those qualities and criteria I mentioned are easy to measure.

I mentioned accumulated skills. Can you measure skill? Yes. Absolutely. You can measure someone's social skills by how liked he is by his community. You can measure someone's billiard skills by how often he wins matches and how quickly he wins matches. You can measure his video-making skills by how many likes he gets in YouTube. The list is endless. And we have to rely on things that are measurable, otherwise we end up with subjective criteria that are defined by varying opinions. We must find ways to quantify success, and the list I gave are very good options.

An athlete who can squat 500 pounds is a testament to so many things about him. It shows things like discipline and work ethic. It also shows the difficult-to-accept truth that people were not created equal. Either way, it's measurable.

I don't look for deeper dimensions because then we end up talking about woowoo stuff like "strength of spirit" and "witchpower."

It seems to me many people use “deeper dimensions” to refer to more subtle and complex physiological desires and motivations, and may even propose the effects of these desires and motivations might be analogous to existence of some fictional realm (for example a good angle and evil demon representing conflicting motivations).     But they do not seem to mean to imply literal existence of some otherworldly realm.

[Angrboda]

Please elaborate.

You only see the outside of things, which really has nothing to do with what's going on in a person's heart.

[Gentle_Idiot]

Please elaborate.

You only see the outside of things, which really has nothing to do with what's going on in a person's heart.

There's no device that numerically measures feelings. What do you want me to do, measure my blood pressure when I'm earning my salary?

[HappySkeptic]

You only see the outside of things, which really has nothing to do with what's going on in a person's heart.

There's no device that numerically measures feelings. What do you want me to do, measure my blood pressure when I'm earning my salary?

The topic is about success.  To measure success, one must first define it.  A person's values and internal state are valid arbiters of determining what success means for them.

I will not accept anyone else's criterion for what a successful life looks like.  If I definite is as having certain types of wealth, or having a successful career that's fine.  But what if I define success as happiness, or psychological well-being?  That is my choice.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

There's no device that numerically measures feelings. What do you want me to do, measure my blood pressure when I'm earning my salary?

The topic is about success.  To measure success, one must first define it.  A person's values and internal state are valid arbiters of determining what success means for them.

I will not accept anyone else's criterion for what a successful life looks like.  If I definite is as having certain types of wealth, or having a successful career that's fine.  But what if I define success as happiness, or psychological well-being?  That is my choice.

Well put. If a hermit living in an off-grid cabin in the middle of the woods believes he’s a success, no one can gainsay him.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

^agree

Everyone has their own idea of what it means to be successful in their own life.

What they consider success in another may not mean success for that person.

[Rev. Rye]

I don't care if the extent of your "success credibility" is finishing a grand total of one semester in community college with straight B's on merely 9 credits (three classes), or ending up as the most influential politician in a world power like China or America, or anywhere in between. Athletic accomplishments count, video game victories count, anything counts as long as it's a worthy goal that was achieved...

For you, if you can summarize your thoughts, what do you think it takes for a person to go from rags to riches?

I consider myself a philosopher and I generally just avoid theological and metaphysical questions like the plague. But on matters of ethics, morality, psychology, and eudamonia, I get enthused to hear things and talk things.

I'm all ears. Please.

The one constant I've been able to find in success stories is sheer dumb luck. You could bust your ass off for decades and it ultimately wouldn't mean a thing (at least in terms of outward success) unless something happens like, finding a much more successful person who can bring more attention to what you're doing, or being able to do something else that a lot of other people want and coming to their attention at the right time (preferably before there are too many other people doing the same thing.)

Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his life. It sold for roughly the equivalent of less than $1800 in today's money. It took decades after his suicide for the right voices to turn the art world onto this obscure Dutch painter and make him into one of the most famous painters in history, who, for over a decade, even had the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

And by contrast, Nathanael West, one of my favourite authors, died in 1940, and, between his four novels, he had less than 10,000 copies printed of them total. None of them sold well, and, despite his having quite a few champions, and two of his books even being made into films (both films flopped hard), and even with the protagonist of the longest-running sitcom in American history being named after one of West's protagonists, even decades later, I've had literature teachers who never heard of him before I mentioned him.

[Belacqua]

I have lived in a world where you were valued for your physical abilities (as a man) and women were valued more by virtue of being physically beautiful. I have also lived in a world where you are judged by your bank account. It is fair to say that my own values are different from others, but what else is there? Those qualities and criteria I mentioned are easy to measure.

I mentioned accumulated skills. Can you measure skill? Yes. Absolutely. You can measure someone's social skills by how liked he is by his community. You can measure someone's billiard skills by how often he wins matches and how quickly he wins matches. You can measure his video-making skills by how many likes he gets in YouTube. The list is endless. And we have to rely on things that are measurable, otherwise we end up with subjective criteria that are defined by varying opinions. We must find ways to quantify success, and the list I gave are very good options.

An athlete who can squat 500 pounds is a testament to so many things about him. It shows things like discipline and work ethic. It also shows the difficult-to-accept truth that people were not created equal. Either way, it's measurable.

I don't look for deeper dimensions because then we end up talking about woowoo stuff like "strength of spirit" and "witchpower."

You have an interesting approach to things. It's something I hadn't thought about before.

It hadn't occurred to me that to be meaningful success would have to be quantifiable. 

Leftists, Buddhists, and other alternative value types sometimes criticize modern society as being too dependent on quantifiability. Obviously science demands it, and perhaps this is why it gets applied to other, non-science parts of life. But this often ends up with dollar-value being the only way we can talk about a thing's worth, since sentimental or emotional or ethical value doesn't have a number figure. Scientism and capitalism go hand in hand. 

I don't know what "witchpower" is and would be skeptical of it. "Strength of spirit" makes sense to me, though. We all have tough times in life, and it is good if we can get through them without crumbling too badly. To me, a strong spirit is one who knows how to endure hardship. (Which would include knowing how to ask for help -- not solely cowboy individualism.) 

The reason I brought up Walden earlier is because it represents a famous American alternative to the usual values of wealth and fame. It's the most famous, but there are a lot of books which see success as the ability to live happily without the usual societal markers. There used to be a strong alternative tradition in the US, consisting of Thoreau fans, hippies, certain kinds of Protestant ascetics, etc. Their goal was never to renounce success or pleasure but to define it differently from the mainstream bourgeoisie. It occurs to me now that this tradition may be largely forgotten now, as capitalism takes over more and more of life. When I was in college, though, there were both Christian influences on the shallowness of "worldly goods," and hippy/Buddhist values on a simple life of heightened awareness. When Gary Snyder came to speak at my college they had to move his speech to the main movie theatre because so many people wanted to hear it. 

In China and Japan, too, there is a long long tradition of "recluse literature." These vary in their seriousness, but it's probably fair to say that they all grow out of Buddhist thought on what's important. Generally they talk about how success is a matter of leaving the rat race and learning to live happily with less. Open-eyed awareness of how your garden changes through the seasons, and appreciation of its beauty, is something to be valued more than money. That kind of thing.

[Anomalocaris]

Or one could take a brutally biological view and say humans, for all their vainglorious pretenses, are nothing more than baroque phases in the reproductive cycles of gametes  .    So success in human life means doing the most to ensure the genes embodied in the eggs and sperms that made it are represented in the gene pool far into the future.


Don’t get too full of yourself.   You are just gamete’s way of making more gametes.

Ok, I will show myself out now.

[Gentle_Idiot]

Or one could take a brutally biological view and say humans, for all their vainglorious pretenses, are nothing more than baroque phases in the reproductive cycles of gametes  .    So success in human life means doing the most to ensure the genes embodied in the eggs and sperms that made it are represented in the gene pool far into the future.


Don’t get too full of yourself.   You are just gamete’s way of making more gametes.

Ok, I will show myself out now.

Honestly, if you define success in that way, it's gonna be unfair to the sexes. Success for males will be measured simply by how many women they are able to impregnate, a la Genghis Khan. And unfortunately for women, their success will be measured simply by how many babies they can bear.

Nah man. I prefer the Enlightenment era Europe view in which women's success is measured not by baby production, but simply by how many men (and how awesome the men are) they are able to entice with their seductive charms. It's a more aesthetic way of seeing things.

Women's truest value is their physical beauty. Everything else is trivial. That's how it is in its rawest sense and that's how it should be even in a very cultured environment. Otherwise, we're gonna end up glorifying feminists.