371. The psychology of success

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. In today's episode, in honor of the new year, and you know the ambitions a lot of us probably hold for twenty twenty six, we're going to be taking a look at success specifically. They're very intricate, fascinating psychology behind success. Now, this is a topic that I've actually I've shied away from this for a little while. I feel a little bit weird talking about it. Sometimes I feel weird talking about success and ambition so outwardly, and I often have this assumption that it's going to make me appear shallow or egotistical or arrogant, you know, if I were to acknowledge my own desire for success, or acknowledge what it means to work for success, the psychology of it. But the fact is, what I've come to realize is being successful is a huge human desire, and it's intertwined with a lot of other major human desires, our need to strive, our need for purpose. And that doesn't mean everyone's version of success is going to look the same mind might be different to yours, but whatever it is, the psychology behind what pushes us to be ambitious and to want more for ourselves is so intriguing, and that is exactly what I want to break down today. What defines success, what maybe determines success in some people and not in others, And essentially, how can we use the psychology, how can we use the principles and the research to be super clear on our own version of success and the behaviors, the habits, the actions that might get us closer to that. So I'm excited for this episode. There is a lot of research packed into this short episode. Let's get into it. Firstly, I want to talk about what we actually mean by this concept of success, just breaking it down a little bit further, because surprise, surprise, it is not as straightforward as we may assume. There are basically two versions of success. There's objective success and there is subjective success. Objective success is the visible ledger, the part that I guess other people can verify without having to know you as a person. The salary figure, the job title, the degree, accolades, bestseller list, magazine covers. It's something that we can see, count, compare, and often reward through admiration, prospect, fame, those kinds of things. Think of objective markers as I guess social currency that signal value, but also signals something else, talent, maybe hard work, passion, motivation. They essentially offer what we call a mental heuristic. We assume someone who has success, someone who has things on the objective ledger that makes them successful, must therefore contain another thing about themselves, a special secret trait that has gotten them there, whether that is true or not. So those markers definitely serve a visual purpose. They serve a purpose in general, but by themselves. You know, objective success doesn't necessarily mean fulfillment unless there is something more emotional and spiritual attached to you know, what you have achieved and what you have done. I know people who have been on the Forbes thirty under thirty list who have multi million dollar businesses, who have done incredible things. They have been on this podcast before and outly they appear very successful, but have revealed you know privately to me how miserable they are because they have objective success without also accounting for the second side of it, subjective success. So subjective success focuses on how you truly feel about and within your life, regardless of I guess, appearances or accolades. So subjective success, if you want to experience it, has a couple of layers. The first is hardonic well being, so basically the short term evaluation of your state of mind or how happy we feel in the moment. You can have a lot of objective success but experience very little day to day pleasure because you are really busy, you are really burnt out, you are lonely, and you are unhappy. So the house to be a level of herdonic well being, and then also you tomonic wellbeing. This is the deepest sense that your life is aligned with your values, aligned with your potential. You are in an expansive state as a human being. This element of success is it's not optional right to have a successful life. Your life also has to have your goals. Your achievements have to have personal significance, and yes accolades may be a part of that, but crucially they cannot be all of it. And now most of us have been trained to optimize the objective metrics of success and just kind of hope the subjective side kind of takes care of care of itself. We kind of just hope that it will fall into place and like will fall in love with the thing that brings us money, will fall in love with the thing that brings us praise and admiration. But works that way. Study after study finds that objective metrics of success don't correlate to greater well being. It's the subjective ones that do so. Money, for example, may make you slightly happier, but only up to a point. You know. You may have heard about this famous study that one hundred thousand dollars is like the threshold where any more money after that won't actually help your well being. I think nowadays, isn't this crazy? Like the new figure is two hundred and fifty thousand. The same goes with achievements and accolades. You know, I always think about these people who like famous, people who have Grammys and an oscars and egots and whatever it is, and how is that the thing that actually has made them a happy individual is that the thing that really matters, and I think a lot of them would say probably not. The thing that mattered to them was relationships, was getting to fine tune a craft, was creativity and whatever that is for you. If that element is incomplete, you will be as well. So if you want to be successful, you have to have the combination of objective and subjective success, and you have to be able to care about the goal beyond the visuals or what it means for others. Now, this is how we can understand this further. We can understand this further using something known as self determination theory. This is one of the most famous psychological theories there is. I am sorry to my psychology students out there. I know you are sick of hearing about this, but it has to be talked about. It was first proposed in the nineteen eighties and the basic principle of SDT is basically that as humans, we function best. We find success when three basic psychological needs are met autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When each of these is achieved, success is also achieved. And it's quite formulae. It's not necessarily simple, So let's break down these components. The first is autonomy, If you want to be successful, your goals have to be yours to begin with. They're not something that was put onto you, something that you feel pressured to do. There has to be a genuine, independent love for the thing. A simple way to test this is to take any major goal you have right now, anything that you think will make you successful, and finish this sentence for me, I chose this because I choose to do this. I choose to pursue this because and then answer that question if it ends with because it will look impressive, because my parents expect it, because I want to prove people wrong because I should. That is a sign that your motive is being driven from the outside, and I get I get it. I get that. Sometimes when you really truly want to get to a certain position in whatever area that is, there may be certain hurdles you have to jump through that don't immediately align with what you want success to feel like. You know, sometimes you do hard work because you do need to impress people to get to where you want to go, or because you do need a certain amount of money to pursue a dream of yours. But at the end of the day, the outcome you envision way down the line, why does that specific outcome strike a nerve for you? If you want to be successful, you have to know why and you have to be clear on that. So the next part of the formula is competence. Competence is the feeling of getting better at something that matters to you. It is the moment that you notice, oh my god, this thing that used to take me an hour now only takes me fifteen minutes, or like, wow, like my third draft of this novel is really starting to say what I wanted to say, or like I can run that distance I used to think was impossible. It's basically the intersection of challenge and skill. We call it the Goldilock zone. You need to be focused on a task or a goal that's not so easy that you might drift away or find it boring, but not so hard that you are paralyzed by fear and don't know what your next step might be. It's also what we might call the flow state, where you just feel aligned with your goal. You feel that it's not too difficult, you're engaged in it, you're wanting to learn, you're wanting to push forward. You know, to achieve success, you need to also be pursuing competence. You need to be giving your brain a target, something to get better at. This is another defining feature of successful outliers in this world. They do not have vague ambitions. They give their brain something specific. They give their mind, they sold their body something specific to work towards. You know, they don't just say I want to be more creative, or I want to get rich, I want to get in shape. They have a specific vision that they can track their effort to wards, and they then amend their efforts. They get better through the process. They also feel a personal sense of drive towards that thing that is being fueled by competence. Now, the final element to this equation, to this theory of what makes somebody successful, what makes somebody feel successful is relatedness. This is the ability to experience a sense of belonging or connection with other people through the pursuit of your goal. It is the difference between numbers on a dashboard and work that feels really human. A recent Canadian study looking at over five thousand people, replicated of finding that has been spoken about for years. The happiest people, the most successful people, the people who say I've had a successful life. The thing that they all have in common is good, long term, meaningful relationships, even when we hold you know, even when we control for money and for accolades. If you want to be successful, you cannot operate in isolation. You cannot skimp on relationships. Look at your goals again, look at what you want one in your life, and ask who actually benefits from this. If you can't name a single person other than yourself, your success is never going to feel it's never going to have any depth to it. You're always going to feel lacking. It's this strange balance, right. Intrinsic motivation requires us to care deeply for ourselves first and to pursue something because we genuinely love it. But relatedness asks for that not to be the only thing that you care about. That kind of point of balance, that like knife's edge, is where successful people live. At least that's that's what the theory says. I can think of a few people who aren't necessarily doing that, but that's what the theory says. They think not just about themselves, but how it's going to help or impact others. Okay, let's now turn towards the specific habits of successful people that fall into this formula. What are successful smart people, the people we admire doing that we are not doing, And how can we take what they know and implement it in our own lives to find our own version of success. That is what we're going to talk about next. Stay tuned. The habits of successful people that show up again and again in the research are honestly kind of boring. They're kind of simple. Dare I say that is why they work? Now? A quick caveat here, I have to acknowledge that there are some theories out there that habits these things we're going to talk about may only account for like twenty percent of success. You could do all of these things and maybe still not find what you're looking for. Another twenty percent is raw talent. But the final remainder of the equation of what makes somebody successful is just luck and its circumstances and its context. That is one theory is on this, and there is a very famous book on this, it's called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that discusses this theory, and his argument basically is that success isn't about how smart you are, it isn't about how hard working you are. It's about where you come from, where you're born, who helps you, and the systems that you're embedded in. You know, for example, Bill Gates, I don't know if you know this, but he had early access to computers purely because his high school was one of like three or four high schools in the United States with computers, so way before anybody else had access to these machines. He had thousands of hours of practice before anyone else started. And you know, he was also born in nineteen fifty five, like he reached adulthood, just as like the personal computer revolution was beginning, somebody who was born in nineteen eighty like didn't have that advantage. Success is a whole lot of luck. But I don't find that discouraging because I truly believe all of us have a special talent for something. All of us have something we know just a little bit more about than others, or have had early experiences with, like Bill Gates, that we can take and make into something amazing. You need luck to be successful, yes, but you equally need habits. You need the full one hundred percent. You know, if you leave out the behaviors and the actions, you won't reach your goal, no matter how much is stacked in your favor. You know, think about Bill Gates. Yes he had all these great things. A lot of people who have success have all these early advantages, but they could have also just done nothing with it. You have advantages that you don't know about yet until you act on them. So as much as there is a theory that habits don't matter, they one hundred percent do. They are the thing that really pushes people over the line. With that in mind, here are the five standout ones that the psychology and the research says that successful people have. Number One, successful people fail a lot, and failure is in built into their creative and into the creative process and their pursuit. You know, we often only see the perfect celebration photos or the awards, the medals. You don't see failed assignments, emails that never got a response, dream deals that fell through. This is the reality of every successful every successful person. I was going to say many, it's every Realistically, the majority of the time spent working towards a goal or a dream is spent on countless iterations of the same idea which never come out fully developed, or countless attempts that just don't hit a target. Ask any person you admire. They all have a story of someone who said someone who told them, like, you know, it's pointless. What you're doing is pointless. You're gonna fail. It's a really bad idea. Literally every single person has that story. My favorite one is Meryl Streep. You know, you know when she auditioned for King Kong, the director called her ugly in Italian, not knowing that she spoke Italian, and she didn't get the part. Like the literal Meryl Streep Miranda Priestley, the icon, she was rejected for all, for all intents and purposes, like she failed. And so when you fail, when you are rejected, that puts you on the same camp as her, That puts you one more failure closer to your dream. And the thing is, if she'd stopped at that first plateau or that first hurdle, she wouldn't be the success she is now, and she wouldn't have become what she is. Having a resilience and a resistance to failure is a personality attribute that every successful person has in common. And it's also a habit that you can, you know, strengthen in yourself. Secondly, successful people know the value of working in silence such that outward forces don't interrupt their creative process or their their thought process. I think we live in a little bit of like a share first, act later culture. But there is this curious thing psychologists noticed about that, which is that when you tell people about your goals or about your dreams before you have acted on them, often that can mean that you essentially don't feel the need to go through with it anymore. I talked about this in Your Year for Doing lesson Achieving More in that episode. But essentially telling people your goals symbolizes the kind of person you are, which means that you don't have to act on those goals. In the meantime, we get the recognition that we want We get the sense that we are acting out the person we want to be by simply talking about what we want to do without actually doing it. Now, obviously some people don't operate this way. Sometimes public acknowledgment can help you work harder when you feel like there is a standard you need to reach or a promise you need to fulfill, And sometimes people announce their goals as a way of accountability, so they're more likely to follow through. The follow through, though, has to be crucial. You know, you have to be able to act on your goals and work on them without praise, without recognition, without visibility. I just think that the ability to work silently makes you and your ambitions more intimate with each other, if that makes sense. Like you have less fear around making mistakes because you're not doing them publicly. You have more room for experimentation early on, which is like, you know, the crucial part of any success story is again the failure at the beginning, the risk at the beginning. You get to grow without projecting embarrassment onto your efforts, without feeling embarrassed because people are watching, which can stop you from doing anything in the first place, So there will be time to share a take a slip out of the successful admirable people's books, and just let your work mature first. Thirdly, successful individuals typically follow the eighty twenty rule. This is also known as the Pareto principle, which basically says that eighty percent of consequences come from twenty percent of causes or actions. Fancy way of saying, a small part of what you do, a small part of how you act, most of the results. Now, if you're a perfectionist like myself. You may hate to hear this. We have this habit of like obsessing over one hundred percent of every single detail. But in reality, a lot of successful people make sacrifices and they just satisfy requirements rather than perfecting them. They make things good enough on purpose, not sloppy, not bad, but good enough. They understand the cost of obsessing over details that other people may not even appreciate. The twenty percent is their focus. That is where they know they will see the most impact on the end result, and in practice that looks like choosing and protecting the highest leverage pieces before you start. If that's an essay, it is the main argument instructor and structure, not the synonyms and the spacing. If it is studying foreign exam, it is the high yield concepts and your retrieval practice, not rehighlighting every single paragraph. If it is I don't know a movie or a movie script, it is the relatable, intricate, cool character, not again, not like the small minute things that people are going to flip over, not how your script is structured or how it looks visually on a page. Decide what must be true for your vision to work, what are the crucial three to four elements that need to be great and let that drive your effort. This also means deciding ahead of time what done will look like for you and what that will mean for you, and then respect that finished boundary. When will I be okay with, you know, putting this project or putting this desire out into the world. When will I let it be seen? Is there a part of me that's just so afraid of judgment or embarrassment that no matter how much work I do on this, I will never allow it to be visible because I'm afraid. You have to find a way to also circumvent that deep fear as well. Check in with yourself on whether this is good enough, whether the extra hour will actually change the outcome or just soothe your anxiety, Whether the extra month will actually improve upon your goal or make you more successful, or whether again it's just a form of self protection. And I think this allows you not only to avoid burnout through additional labor and mental fatigue, but also, you know, be realistic about what's beneficial and what's superfluous to your goals and prioritize your time in a way that it's going to be spent well and better. The cliche throughout this all, the cliche of this specific is basically working smarter, not harder. That is what successful people do. We are up to our fourth tip, and this one is actually this one's my favorite. This is the one that I rely on the most. It's my favorite habit of all, and that is that successful people learn how to enjoy hard work. Here is this like the sneaky superpower nobody probably taught you in school. You can actually condition your brain to find hard work and effort rewarding in its own right. Robert Eisenberger. He called this concept learnt industriousness. It basically means that when your effort repeatedly leads to a meaningful reward, the effort itself begins to feel good, maybe even fun and enjoyable. And that reward crucially doesn't need to be external. It doesn't need to be an objective success. It doesn't need to be external praise or money or fame or whatever. It can just be enjoyment, satisfaction, progress, or competence. Like we spoke about before, basically fall in love with what it feels like to get better and focus on the parts of the process that you really enjoy and that you find romantic learned industriousness. Like it's basically just for me romanticizing hard work until the work doesn't feel hard. When I was at university, for example, I the way I got good at studying is that I really enjoyed and I romanticized late nights at the library. You know, it made me fall in love with the process and with the hard work because there was some like secondary satisfaction in it. So I rarely studied before midday. I really studied before five pm because I just found that that sensation of like ooh, it was almost like the narrative around like working hard and working hard at night and it's dark and like it's whimsical. Not whimsical, it's like it's romantic and it's like, I don't know, academic Like that allowed me to experience learned industriousness. The work itself was something I fell in love with. It might be that you're really struggling to, you know, figure out a problem at work, and when you finally figure it out, there is this huge sense of relief so that next time, you know, you feel more patient, you feel more willing to tackle the next difficult problem. It might feel like changing your environments so that you know, going to a we work, going to like a coworking space so you feel the romance and like the inspiration of being around other people who are working hard. It may be setting up rewards for certain hurdles you know you have to cross, certain things you know you have to do, falling in love with reaching your limit and then that becoming your new base point. And I know that sounds very cerebral and very like up in the air. It's a feeling that you need to learn how to chase though, because like wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whatever your goal is, like, there's going to become a point where it's just gonna suck and it's gonna be hard, and you're not gonna see results and blah blah blah, Like there is always gonna be the dip where you're not seeing outcomes anymore. So when you cannot rely on the outcomes to reinforce your behavior, rely on the behavior to reinforce your behavior because you enjoy it just intrinsically, like when you can hack that, when you can feel that, like I genuinely believe like you can achieve do be literally anything you want to be. Okay, we're gonna take one more teeny tiny break and then when we return, I have tip number five plus just like some very simple advice for you, but important advice on how to include subjective success in your ambitions and in your dreams. So stay with us. We have made it finally to tip number five. Number five drum roll plays. Successful people structure their environments to make focusing easier. They understand the importance of environmental cues and environmental productivity. Let me ask you this question, how much laziness, procrastination, boredom do you think comes down to simply the fact that your environment is stacked against you, that you're focused next to you all the time, that you're working somewhere with distractions. We romanticize willpower, but we also know that the context we're in there, in the environment we're in, plays a huge role in our attention, our focus, our drive, habits piggyback on our vironmnal cues. In behavioral science literature, this is referred to as choice architecture. It's basically the act of deliberately crafting an environment that makes the decisions you want to make easier and the decisions you don't want to make, or the behaviors you don't want to do harder without actually forcing you to pursue a specific outcome. Basically the most simplest example. If you want to I don't know. I'm trying to think of a really basic one. If there is water by your bedside table and a soda in the fridge, you're gonna drink the water first if you're really thirsty, Like, it's just simple, right, It's just you've just cued it. If your phone is four inches from your hand, Congratulations, you have created choice architecture. You have created an environment where you have built a phone checking habit because it is the path of least resistance. If your desk, on the other hand, is a single purpose zone, your apps are blocked for sixty minutes. You have a no phone space in a go phone space like that helps you break unhelpful habits by focusing on the environment and how you can manipulate it to help yourself. Keep it just super simple. Give spaces one job, have a designated deep workspace, have a designated workspace. Do not do homework, do not do work work, do not do whatever it is on your phone in bed like that is your rest space. Or don't bring your phone in bed and only use it in your living room. Another big one, do not eat lunch at your desk. Trust me on this one. Twenty twenty one study showed indications that it actually makes you less productive, even if you imagine, even if you believe it is saving you time. You know, if you're wanting to read more and stop scrolling before bed, pick an interesting book, put it on your pillow. If you want to learn the guitar, put the stand right next to your sofa or right next to the place where you're going to sit down and maybe even experience the most boredom throughout the day, so that you know the alternative is right there. You don't have to go looking for it. There is literally no friction between you and the decision or the path that you most want to take. When you make these small adjustments to your environment, you know it turns your desired choices into habits simply by allowing or increasing repetition through the reduction of pain points between you and your desired behavior and therefore you and your desired goals. Okay that those are my five tips that I have gathered from the research gathered from investigating this. Crucially, though, we have to return to this idea that a through line throughout all of this is that if you want success, you have to actually have an identity beyond success. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the danger of a narrow, status centered identity is that you create contingent self worth. You only feel worthy when you're winning. You only feel worthy when the singular goal that you have focused on is being achieved. And often I describe it as like having a toxic boyfriend or a toxic girlfriend. You know, when things are going good, it's absolutely amazing. When things are going bad, it's horrendous because you have nothing else to rely on. So take all these tips, do with them what you will, but make sure that you have an identity that is wide enough to contain all versions of yourself. Be as focused as you need to be. Lock in and fall in love with the hard work. Also, have a hobby. Have an interest, because that will diversify your sense of self, therefore making it stronger. And this could literally be anything volunteering, coloring, cooking for your friends. You know, there is this idea, and I think even sometimes like I've I've probably promoted it by accident, but like, there's this idea that if you want something, you have to be so focused on it that you live, breathe, become the blood of that thing. But you know, these other things are not distractions. They're actually necessary cushioning for the rest of your life, necessary so that you can stay whole and rounded, rather than this machine that is all about output and goals. I think the paradox is, and the important paradoxes, is that pouring into your wider identity often improves the traditional markers of success as well. With less fear of riding on each outcome, you take smarter risks, you bounce back faster, you experiment more freely. And a last reminder, this is my last one I promise before I wrap up this episode, is that just remember people find success at all ages. There is this huge, massive, major emphasis on finding success young and early, so that you can ride the highs for longer, so that you can prove yourself. I don't want any of us believing that you know, your twenties are the only decade where you can really do something, or that you're running out of time because because you haven't done it. Yet you have so much time. You are not behind whatever age you are, and I literally mean whatever age you are, you could be ninety nine. There is someone who has found their success older than you are now, and many many others other than that have created their own version of success that is not glamorous but was deeply meaningful for them at any age, any stage, any point in their life. So you are not behind. Timelines are literally I will die on this hill. They are literally a social fiction and real life will peak in all different places for different reasons. So if you are still sampling in your twenties and you're experimenting, and you're unsure what objective or subjective success even looks like for you, I actually think that's an incredible thing. That means you have even more to discover. You have a blank slate in front of you that a lot of individuals would be envious of. So as much as we have I definitely highlighted and emphasized a lot of the sexy, glamorous examples of success. And as much as people love a young success story and they're in our face all the time, again, you have time. You can change at any minute. If you are focusing on the twenty percent, if you are leveraging talent, leveraging context, and then also doing the work so that when the opportunity arrives, not if when it arrives, like you are going to be so ready. You're going to have everything you need in your toolkit to just be like cool, I'm going to hit the ground running. I'm going to fail, and I'm going to know that that is like failure is on my to do list. I'm going to you know, work in silence. I'm going to follow the eighty twenty rule. I'm going to follow the learned industrious rule, and I'm going to just like create the environments that I need to succeed. Like that is what you're going to be ready to do. So I'm excited for each and every one of you. That is all for me today. If you have made it this far, I want you to answer in the comments for me this question. What is your favorite success story? Who is a traditional and traditionally successful person that you admire and why is that? I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below. As always, thank you to our researcher Libby Colbert for her wonderful excellent contributions to this episode. She is a star. Make sure that you're following us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast, and if you have an episode's suggestion something we haven't covered yet, feel free to email us The Psychology of your twenties at gmail dot com or send me a DM. I would absolutely love to hear from you, But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, and as always, we will talk very very soon.