What is success to you? Good chance that you've been influenced by the role models from your youth and the culture around you. Perhaps, it is money, status, or significance. Perhaps it's fame or admiration? Or is it freedom?
But at some point, what does more money buy you? What will you spend that on that really moves the needle? Research shows that above a threshold of about €70.000 yearly income, happiness doesn't rise with it. More fame? More people that know about you don't necessarily mean more love or belonging. More freedom? Isn't belonging and love a result of connection and a bit of interdependence? There must be better ways to secure these than to hoard more for yourself.
All these come down to love, safety, or belonging. But, once you get over the foundational needs and have done the work to keep your ego in check, you get to the enjoyment of the work and more importantly to contribution. If you can, you want to help. Secure people have more space to be generous.
Being valuable to the people around you is a great way to get more love, safety, and belonging. "How can I help?" is a lens for your work that you can adopt right away and continue every day. Ironically, it's is also the best way to get to a secure point in the first place.
This shifts the purpose of everything you do from "How can I get a bigger slice?" to "How can we grow the pie for everyone?" That's some Christmas spirit for you. So what is success to you?
In my conversation with Edo Wiersema on De Gebakken Peren Podcast we talked about his mission to, when De Stadstuin gets to a certain point, start sharing the success with his employees and clients. We also chat about the balance between diving into a project head first vs strategically checking whether or not it's wise now; and about the influence of the individual vs the dependence of your environment and network. Check out this inspiring conversation.
