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I’ll be frank. I’ve been upended by the results of the presidential election. Things that seemed clear are now clouded, and I’ve been spending time trying to rub a little clear space on the window in front of me. I’m trying to read reactions to gage mine. I’m unsure whether total panic and hysteria because we’ve just elected the person who will cause our democracy to crumble is the right reaction, or whether things will get icky for the next few years, but overall, the arc is bending towards justice, so we need to work on accomplishing what good we can and resist what is immoral.
If you think about it, this election is all about success. The wealthy who voted for Trump want to hang onto their wealth. Those who didn’t stayed home because they don’t think it makes a difference despair of ever having their goals prioritized. The working class whites who seem to have decided the election for Trump by a small percentage that turned out to be definitive because of the electoral college are mad. Why? Because they do not feel successful.
Well, what is success? How do we individuals define it? And how do we define it as a country? After all, the recent presidential campaigns brought us mirror-image visions of our country, one as the example of success, the other as emblem of failure. Those who say the economy has begun to recover from the housing and banking crash of 2008, and that progress is happening, albeit incrementally, paint a rosy landscape, because overall, statistically speaking, the numbers look good for the US of A. But then there was the rhetoric of Donald Trump and some of the hardcore conservatives, that the USA is failing, that we need “law and order,” that jobs are vanishing to competitor countries, and that immigrants are threatening to overwhelm us.
How are these diametrically opposing views both true? This comes down to how we define success. This comes down to the too-frequently ignored truth about success, which is that what looks like success to others might not feel like success to some. The stock market may be going up and up, but to someone who has lost job, home, health insurance, a thriving town, or a friendly neighborhood, this concept of success is meaningless. Do we as a collective define success for our country as financial well-being of a bunch of companies? Or do we define it as a country whose people, not just the well-to-do ones, feel successful?
I’ve been writing and thinking about what makes people feel successful for quite some time. I have concluded there are five essential planks on the scaffolding of success, and if these things are in place, I can not only feel successful, I can also accomplish goals. These five elements of success are
- Permission - a sense of permission to define what success is for me; permission to pursue a goal meaningful to me.
- Like-minded others/Loving Mirrors - a term coined by Noah St. John, the importance of working within a supportive community of others who can buoy you when you’re sinking by reflecting at you that they can see you have abilities you may only dream you have.
- Centering - whether it be meditation, yoga, prayer, or regular exercise, an activity that develops the brain’s capacity to be attentive to what’s happening now, without worry about the past or the future.
- Goals and mind-work — setting and working towards achievable, but challenging goals, using all kinds of strategies to tweak your brain and help you beat doubt and other obstacles.
- Values - Knowing what is important to you, and who you are, so that you can center your goals and activites around a solid core. When work aligns with meaning, then purpose propels you.
To develop my definition, I had to let go of the definition I grew up with, the dominant cultural of definition of success, the one that relies on wealth, prestige, and power. Well, with that as the definition, it's no wonder there are a lot of people in this country who feel like failures. From where I sit, on my East Coast liberal elite high horse, parsing success and failure, I wonder if what I’ve learned about success for myself can apply to those Rust Belt folks whose jobs have been usurped by automation and factory closings. Would centering activities help them? A little meditation, yoga, or if you like your centering to involve lots of sweat, HIIT classes or a good jog? Well, frankly, yes, I imagine those things would help, to a degree.
But let’s talk about meaning and purpose. Let’s talk about work. Because that’s what the voters are talking about. Jobs. Just before the election I read an op-ed piece in my preferred liberal propaganda machine, the NYTimes. This particular piece was a joint effort by the Dalai Lama and some dude (Arthur C. Brooks) from the American Enterprise Institute, which is, I believe, considered a conservative think tank. This piece was prescient, it turns out. It talks about why there is so much anxiety and despair in our society, which overall, on the books, is actually doing pretty well. Overall, things are looking up. Hey, the stock market has been doing great. But also, you know, finally wages have started to go up. And a lot of people have health insurance. Hell, things ahve been going so well that we’ve been able to devote time - so much time, so much ink - to issues such as whether a person who looks like a female but is technically a male needs to pee in the mens’ or womens’ room, as opposed to whether its okay to cart off a certain segment of the society and burn them in ovens or something like that.
And yet, as the Dalai Lama so wisely writes, “Refugees and migrants clamor for the chance to live in these safe, prosperous countries, but those who already live in those promised lands report great uneasiness about their own futures that seems to border on hopelessness.”
See - how do we define success? This unease, the Dalai Lama suggests, arises because despite the overall progress, there are specific areas of the country where these benefits are not accruing. And where the things that make people thrive are lacking. Again, according to the Dalai Lama, “Virtually all the world’s major religions teach that diligent work in the service of others is our highest nature and thus lies at the center of a happy life.”
And diligent work in the service of others is exactly what is missing from the lives of so many lower income people. People who lack jobs and prospects, people who are scraping by, or not scraping by but still working hard, lack the three elements of meaningful work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.(Thanks Dan Pink for your book Drive, which introduced me to these ideas). Even if you’re working a low-skill job, if you feel that you are able, through your work, to gain some autonomy in your life, if you have the opportunity to master a small step towards a larger goal, then you can have a sense of purpose and motivation.
Related to this idea is another recent NY Times op-ed by Sherrod Brown, a senator from Ohio, titled, “When Work Loses Its Dignity”. Brown, by the way, starts out with this, “Cleveland — Start with this: When you call us the Rust Belt, you demean our work and diminish who we are.”
Oops. Guilty. I never thought about what Rust Belt means. But I get it. The idea of all the rusting, decaying defunct factories and machines scattered across the industrial midwest is what “Rust Belt” implies. Yeah. Ouch. That isn’t very nice, is it?
Brown continues, “As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, all work has dignity and importance, whether done by a street sweeper, Michelangelo or Beethoven. People take pride in the things they make, in serving their communities in hospitals or schools, in making their contribution to society with a job well done. But over the past 40 years, as people have worked harder for less pay and fewer benefits, the value of their work has eroded. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it.” So he’s about raising the minimum wage and preserving the executive order President Obama signed mandating overtime pay.
So, while the Dalai Lama and Arthur C. Brooks recommend promoting both inner peace and outer security by teaching people they are not superfluous, Sherrod Brown suggests that paying them enough that they can feel like they’re going somewhere other than down, would go a long way towards restoring their dignity. People who feel they have dignity, who feel they are useful, who feel they have purpose, who are able to set goals for themselves and are able to consider things like inner peace, are people who feel successful.
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