Success involves more than a heart-pounding race to the finish line. Our research uncovered four irreducible components of enduring success: happiness (feelings of pleasure or contentment about your life); achievement (accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for); significance (the sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about); and legacy (a way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to help others find future success).
These four categories form the basic structure of what people try to gain through the pursuit and enjoyment of success. Take away any one component, and it no longer feels like “real” success. If you were wildly wealthy because you had mastered a certain business problem but couldn’t experience pleasure, for instance, would you consider yourself successful? If building your power base kept you from being there for others, would your success feel morally right? If you left your career to be a full-time parent, would you have enough of an outlet for your talents? Just as a steady diet of the same four foods would hardly be satisfying over the long term, the four components of success cannot be satisfied by the presence of a single flavor in each category. That is why you cannot neatly categorize the realms of your life, assigning happiness to self, achievement to work, significance to family, legacy to community.
Unless you hit on all four categories with regularity, any one win will fail to satisfy. You’ll experience what we call the “wince factor”: You know you’re doing what is right, but it still feels like a loss. You’re preoccupied with thoughts of the other things you could be doing or getting. Your achievements and pleasures fade almost as soon as they occur. By contrast, success that encompasses all four kinds of accomplishment is enriching; it endures. You can create this synergy within a single event, but you can also create it through a juxtaposition of activities. Taking time out in the middle of a high-stress period or stopping to give back to the community while in the midst of pursuing your most self-advancing goals are good examples of this.
If you think about what constitutes a moment of lasting satisfaction in your own life—maybe it’s your daily practice of a musical instrument—it may be surprisingly trivial in comparison with your major commitments at work or at home. The activity draws force from accomplishing something distinctive in each of the four categories over time. The musical instrument provides release and pleasure (happiness), it is a challenge to master and build on (achievement), and it becomes even more fulfilling when you join a band that competes with other bands or play concerts at hospitals (significance). Those who also turn these “lesser” vocations into legacies that build the same opportunity for the next generation—say, through getting involved in recruiting and training younger musicians—will find an even deeper sense of success from so-called hobbies.
Anyone who takes the four elements of success seriously soon realizes how complicated it can be to touch on all four with regularity. As you scale up your goals, the four-part mix becomes more difficult to achieve. Each factor has a different set of characteristics. Satisfying different needs, they draw on distinctive emotional drives and prioritize self and others in different ways. That’s why people who tell you that happiness, achievement, and significance will come automatically if you simply do the work you love are misguided. Regardless of how much you care about your job, you will still feel conflicting desires—between work and home, between working forever on a problem and taking a break from it, between going for more market share today and investing in the company’s needs for tomorrow. The skills you use to compete are totally different from those you employ in moments of enjoyment. You can be there for a friend, and you can care about a customer, but these acts (in the significance category) can’t be substituted for the kind of thinking and prioritization that is necessary to structure favorable financial terms for your own firm (in the achievement category).
People who tell you that happiness, achievement, and significance will come automatically if you simply do the work you love are misguided.
Understanding the distinctive features of the four areas of success can help you articulate what you are seeking in a certain activity. You can then create a diagnostic for determining how to achieve the most appropriate goal. You may be expecting too many categories to be fulfilled without incorporating the right resources and perspectives, or you may be falling prey to a mismatch.
Matching your expectations to the right category is a critical skill for achieving sustainable success. If you expect happiness to come primarily from competition (an achievement skill), you’ll probably turn into someone neither you nor those around you can tolerate—and wonder why success has made you so lonely. People who report having trouble defining the right goals for themselves or for their companies are often caught in such mismatches. For instance, a self-described family-friendly company might hold critical staff meetings over late dinners or during extended weekend retreats.
The act of categorizing in and of itself can help you take more decisive action and channel the right emotions and perspectives to the task at hand. You can stop measuring a job only by how happy it makes you or calculating a business success only in terms of your ability to achieve mastery over something. Instead, you’ll see how one task fits into a larger context. By the same token, you’ll be able to anticipate what kind of emotional capital you’ll need to bring to a task. If you try to bring feelings of happiness or contentment to your achievement goals, you’ll stunt your performance from the start. If you don’t put achievement in its place, however, you’ll trap yourself in a workaholic restlessness.
Those in our research who achieved satisfying, enduring, multidimensional success consciously went after victories in all four categories without losing touch with their values and special talents. They seemed to understand intuitively the paradox we uncovered at the heart of enduring success: To get to more wins on the various important measures that make up your notion of the good life, success has to rest on a paradigm of limitation in any one activity for the sake of the whole. Or, as we call it, “on the reasoned pursuit of just enough.”
This principle flies in the face of the popular opinion that success is all about breaking through limitations, that it’s about having more, being more, doing more. Our research shows that the high-powered people who experienced real satisfaction achieved it through the deliberate imposition of limits. They all shared a versatile talent that we call “switching and linking”: They were able to focus intensely on one task until it gave them a particular sense of satisfaction, then put it down and jump to the next category with a feeling of accomplishment and renewed energy. This versatile refocusing could occur within the same activity (say, when you base your product strategy on accomplishing your profit goal and on caring for the customer), or it can involve switching attention between two realms (taking a break from work to joke with a friend).
The people in our research who were particularly skilled at sifting through the moving targets and going after only those that would produce lasting rewards shared two characteristics. First, they viewed success as a broad and dynamic experience of accomplishment, one that factored in all four categories. They didn’t attribute their success to one single event or even one single realm of life. Second, their concrete examples of what counted as “real” success included accomplishments of wildly varying magnitude. They weren’t setting maximum goals for themselves in each category; rather, they set some at a small scale and some at a scale that demanded sustained effort. The baseline for these individuals wasn’t the amount of activity or number of rewards in any one category, but the securing of a proportionate mix of all four. Anyone can learn to do this; you just need to have a larger framework in which to understand the dynamics of the four categories
