How to Be Successful In Life

Everyone wants to know how to be successful in Life. For the longest time, I thought the answer was "out there" somewhere, and if I found the right expert or teacher, he or she could help me to find it. In my heart, I felt like I was missing something, so I gave an open mind, and sometimes an open wallet, to anyone who promised to give me the answer.

Want to know how to be successful in Life?

Can anyone show me how to be successful in Life?

It took a long time and a lot of let-downs and disillusionment, but I finally got the answer: nobody out there has the answers for me, and if anyone claims to be able to give me the answers, he or she is either self-deceived or lying.

As the Tao Te Ching puts it, "The one who knows, doesn't say; the one who says, doesn't know."

Doing a quick Google search of the phrase "how to be successful in life" yields some interesting results. Clearly, some people think they can give you a good answer, frequently consisting of seven magic habits or four supposed spiritual laws or some "secret" that all the really successful people in the world already know and practice. It's all bullshit.

I would love to see a debate between a skeptic like Montaigne or Nassim Taleb, on the one hand, and some snake-oil-selling self-help guru, on the other.

Why have I been a sucker for phonies who claim to know how to be successful in Life?

But then I have to ask myself, why did I fall for the self-help charlatans for so long? "Self-help" may be a cliché, but it's also a multimillion dollar industry, in both the church and secular markets, so I'm obviously not the only person who has spent valuable time and money on the garbage some supposed gurus are peddling.

One quick caveat: not all self-help books are bad. A small minority of them are actually good and insightful, especially the ones drawing upon the field of positive psychology (like the work of Dr. Tal Ben Shahar), which is actually based on the scientific method. But the good teachers tend to show humility in their speeches and books; they don't profess to know more than they actually do, and they tend to under-promise and over-deliver, unlike the majority of supposed self-help gurus, who do the opposite. (This seems to be true, in general, about those whose advice is worth taking.)

For me, the purportedly life-changing conference, book, or video series never lived up to the hype; within a short time, the emotional high wore off and I felt pretty much the same as before. And from what I've heard others say -- as well as from the fact that people keep going to conferences and buying books (if any of the previous conferences or books had actually delivered on their promises, those people wouldn't still be so desperately hungry for something more) -- I am fairly confident that I am not the only one who has had this experience.

I'm reminded of a phrase by Bertrand Russell, who said something to the effect that the problem with this world is that "the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubts." That statement may not always be true; I think self-confidence and self-doubt have more to do with temperament and emotional well-being than with intelligence, as there are a lot of very smart people who are blind to gaping holes in their own logic. I know I have, in hindsight, seen huge emotional blind spots, wherein I have accepted half-truths and logical errors to meet an emotional need. If I had heard the same "logic" being used by another person, I would have immediately detected the fallacy or the falsehood, but because it was my own thinking, I was totally blind to it. But at the end of the day, you can fool yourself only for so long. The realities of Life don't care too much about our feelings; the school of hard knocks is a much more effective teacher than self-help gurus or pastors. Life simply is what it is, regardless of how we happen to feel about it, but pastors and self-help quacks know how to sugarcoat their messages to make them emotionally appealing, especially to consumers battling chronic depression.

I know that when I have been feeling depressed and ruminating on how absurd it all seems, I can feel desperate to find a remedy. I hate feeling empty and dreary, just as much as I hate physical pain. I know I have taken much more than the recommended dose of painkillers and combined medications in an unsafe manner, in order to reduce physical pain; somehow, because my mind was so consumed with the pain that I couldn't think about anything else, I determined that immediate relief from that pain was worth any risk to my future health. That was foolish, but in the moment, it made sense. Similarly, when buried alive under a soul-crushing depression, I have become willing to give any remedy an honest try, if there's the slightest chance that it will brighten my mood.

If you've ever suffered from depression, you already know what the experience is like, and no explanation is needed. Depression is hell. It will distort everything about Life: the Sun is shining, and it looks harsh and bitter and depressing; the Sun is not shining, and it looks cold and dreary and depressing; no matter how everything looks, it all looks depressing. It's like putting on tinted glasses that discolor everything about the world, except that those tinted glasses not only distort the world around you, they distort the world within you as well. Memories are corrupted and given a depressing glaze; even thinking about a joyous occasion from the past does no good, as the memory seems cold and haunting, like a ghost.

If you've never experienced depression, no explanation will really convey what the experience is like. Depression is not something you just feel or experience; depression is all-consuming; it's something you become for a few weeks at a time; and while you're inside an episode of depression, it looks like there is no way out, like all the exits have been slam shut, locked tight, and bricked over. It sounds like a tautology: depression makes everything look depressing.

So when I've been really down in the pit (as the term "pit" is used in some of the gloomier Psalms, like Psalm 88), I was an easy dupe for anyone who came along and promised to show me how to be successful in Life. Even though I knew, rationally, that there would be no silver bullet that would give me a life-changing experience, after which I would live (at least generally) in joy and victory, my rational, conscious mind was like a bedridden invalid, after struggling through a few weeks of constant despair and ennui. I knew I didn't have the answer. I knew what I was doing wasn't working. Whether or not I was intelligent, I was certainly very full of doubt. And I was desperate to believe that I could become someone new: someone happy and victorious.

I'd be sitting there, depressed and self-critical, and I'd hear the pitch for some life-changing conference featuring some flashy, charismatic know-it-all, and I'd think, "Well, maybe this one will be different." Or I'd be at the bookstore, and I'd see some shiny, happy person smiling at me from the dustjacket of the latest bestseller, and the title of the book would promise me some kind of guaranteed enlightenment, if I just did everything the author told me to do.

Sometimes, this was done in a church setting, where the speaker, or the folks promoting his conference, would invoke the imprimatur of God himself: if I wanted to experience more of God's power and victory in my life, I needed to attend this guy's conference or buy his book. There's BIG money to be made in the self-help market, and if you can do it in the name of Jesus, you can shelter it from taxes, too!

Why Phony Conferences on "How to Be Successful in Life" sometimes seem to work -- for a time.

To be sure, when you attend a conference where the speaker is upbeat and energetic and all that, and where everyone around you is putting forth their best effort to be upbeat and energetic, you will start feeling more upbeat and energetic yourself. Then, there's some very powerful wish-fulfillment going on, that causes you to experience a very real placebo effect. You believe the speaker when he (almost always a "he") tells you that he used to be down and depressed too, but now he is standing before you as living proof that what he says is true: he used to be just like you, but through his own hard work and brilliant thinking, he turned himself into a smug, self-satisfied, completely non-self-critical, happy-go-lucky extrovert! It's all too good to be true, but you want it to be true, at least for you, and so you believe it; and that makes you feel better.

But it is too good to be true. The issues involved in depression are not solved by simply changing a few habits or following some four-step checklist each day. The current consensus among the relevant medical experts is that depression (and other mood disorders) are just as much a disease as diabetes. (For example, check out Against Depression by Dr. Peter Kramer). Maybe depressed people can watch what they feed their minds, just as diabetics can watch what they feed their stomachs. Maybe such lifestyle changes can help the patient manage her depression, or her diabetes, more successfully. But depression, just like diabetes, causes very real physiological changes (e.g., shrunken hippocampus), which in turn cause very real symptoms of illness. At the end of the day, what some people need is real medical intervention, by trained and licensed professionals, not pious platitudes or slick slogans from some self-help charlatan. Or at the very least, people need treatments that have been rigorously tested and confirmed by empirical evidence.

So if you want to know how to become successful in Life, save your time and your money. The self-help quacks and the religious phonies are all out to promote themselves, at the expenses of others. Some may be aware that they are doing this, but many, possibly most, are not. I think some of these self-help gurus, in order to meet their own emotional needs, really convince themselves that what they are doing is genuinely helpful and that they are really doing it from only the purest of motives.

With religious self-help gurus, their emotional need may be feeling like God is working through them. It probably does seem like they've administered some kind of divine balm to hurting souls, when they see the audience smiling from the emotional high, but they don't see those same people weeks later, after their smiles have turned to looks of despair, when the realities of Life return to kick their emotional asses. The question of whether they have really been used by God should be answered only in light of a bigger picture; how long did the miraculous deliverance really last?

Maybe the more self-aware religious charlatans (like Marjoe Gortner) rationalize the lie by telling themselves that they are providing an emotional high which, even if it is illusory and short-lived, is nonetheless something which people willingly seek, and which may even be of some short-term value. Kind of like selling someone a drug that will get miserable people high and allow them to forget about their problems for a few hours. But like any chemical intoxicant, the false feeling of emotional triumph that comes after these conferences tends to have some unpleasant consequences: badly-needed money is gone, resources that could have gone to building a real solution have been squandered, and the brief high is followed by an emotionally devastating crash and a brutal hangover.

How to Be Successful in Life, part II

I wish that years ago I had really gotten -- really felt and believed -- that nobody "out there" can possibly show me how to be successful in Life; I wish I had saved myself all that time and trouble by realizing long ago that everyone who claims to be able to show me how to be successful is either self-deceived or a liar (but it is what it is -- let me just enjoy being where I'm at, rather than brooding about the path that got me here).

I wish I had accepted the cold, hard fact that God is not going to just deliver me from depression if I recite some out-of-context Bible verse as a mindless mantra, or if I pray the right way, or if I wake up half an our earlier each day to have a proper "quiet time."

I wish I had admitted to myself that the all the wisdom of the ancients and moderns combined couldn't give me all the answers I needed. As (I think) Aristotle said, philosophical discourse is limited because the terms have to "grow to meaning" within us, and not even the wisest philosopher could do that for me.

I read Montaigne years ago, and even Sextus Empiricus, but I didn't really understand the meaning of their message. Here's the truth: nobody knows, and no one can give you the answers for you. The answers aren't even "out there" somewhere for you to find. You have to create them. Maybe God can work through you and with you, so that your act of creating those answers  is part of God's creation. But whether you give God a role in it or not, you have to create your answers.

So back to the question: how to be successful in Life? What does "success" even mean? No one can define it for us. And it takes slowing down and really dealing with the perplexing nuances of Life, in order for us to create any sort of meaningful idea of what "success" means to us. Unfortunately, as Alice Miller showed in the book The Drama of the Gifted Child, we tend to subconsciously adopt someone else's (usually our parents') definition of success, and then force ourselves to pursue that goal, even when it doesn't fit us, and then we beat ourselves up for failing.

But you and I are free to define "success" for ourselves, in a way that accords with our deepest, truest nature -- even though our "nature" is also the result, at least in part, of what we decide to be. As Jean Paul Sartre said in his amazing book Existentialism is a Humanism, for human beings, "being precedes essence." Or as Dr. Viktor Frankl put it, in his classic book Man's Search for Meaning, we should not ask Life what it means; rather, we must realize that Life is asking us what we mean, and only we can give an answer for ourselves.

So in the end, the question of how to be successful in Life should be rephrased as "How do I become myself, and how do I assist others in becoming themselves?"