Success vs. Happiness

Define what you want to achieve without making happiness wait for it.

By Brooke Hicks · The Life Coach School

What does being successful mean to you?

If your answer is vague, you may spend years pursuing something you can’t clearly identify. And if you believe happiness is waiting on the other side, you may spend those years withholding it from yourself.

Success and happiness deserve separate definitions. Understanding the difference changes how you pursue both.

Define success on your own terms

We often borrow a definition of success from our culture. Money. Status. A particular career. Recognition.

Those things may be meaningful to you. But ask whether they are what you want, or what you think you should want.

I think of success as something I define and deliberately achieve. That means I need a clear aim and a way to recognize when I’ve met it.

If you never define the finish line, you can keep moving it. You can accomplish a great deal and still tell yourself you aren’t successful.

Happiness is an emotional experience

In the coaching work I teach, happiness comes from our thinking. A result can give us an occasion to think differently, but the result itself doesn’t do our emotional work for us.

Consider what you expect to think when you reach your goal. Perhaps you’ll decide you’re capable, that your work matters, or that you can relax.

Notice that you are planning to give yourself permission to have those thoughts later. Could you practice a believable version of them now?

This doesn’t mean you should be happy every moment. It means you can stop treating happiness as something you have to earn through one more achievement.

Discomfort doesn’t mean you’re going the wrong way

When you set a goal that stretches you, fear and doubt often appear. You may feel frustrated when a first attempt doesn’t work.

If you thought the whole purpose of the goal was to make you happy, that discomfort can seem like proof you should quit.

But a meaningful goal can expose the thoughts you need to work on. You can learn to feel uncertainty, question self-doubt, and keep taking useful action.

Thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions, and actions create results. Your relationship with the process affects your willingness to stay with it.

Contentment and ambition can coexist

People sometimes ask why they would pursue anything if they could be content now.

For me, wanting to create and evolve doesn’t require hating my current life. I can appreciate what I have and still want to learn, contribute, and make something new.

That is a different starting point from believing I am inadequate until I achieve the next result.

Try asking what you would want to pursue if you didn’t need it to prove your worth or rescue your happiness. The answer may tell you something useful about your desire.

Write two separate definitions

Define success for one area of your life. Be specific about what you want to achieve and why it matters. Choose something you can take responsibility for working toward.

Then consider happiness. What thoughts let you appreciate yourself and your life today? What are you making conditional on future achievement?

Choose a goal you like your reasons for pursuing. Let it challenge you. And practice recognizing what is available emotionally along the way.

You can build a meaningful life without postponing the experience of living it.