Understanding Success

Keeping up with the Joneses

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains.  These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.   

Today's topic takes a step back from a valuable concept of how we view the elements of success and looks hard at how we even define success and whether those definitions actually align with the outcomes we want. It’s part leadership insight part just a great concept to bear in mind in our personal lives as we face a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ as we see figments of reality on social media or even in our next-door neighbors.

Intro

The above meme has floated around social media for a while now. On the left is a sad rabbit with a small carrot top but a huge carrot itself. On the right is a proud rabbit with a huge carrot top and almost no carrot under the ground. The implication is clear; what is visible is not always indicative of what’s out of sight.

This is fantastic advice in general as, so many times, we see people on social media (I’m looking at you Instagram…) who appear fantastically successful, put together, traveling the world, etc. and we compare that to our own, often mundane, lives. We all do this in some way, shape, or form. In fact, here’s a super cute shot of my kids I took last year:

It’s an idyllic, sweet, and heartwarming shot of sibling love.

Or is it?

Actually, it’s a good thing they’re facing the other way because that middle child threw an absolute fit having to pose for this photo and her face is expressing her displeasure. Dad (me) is short-tempered and angry because the sun is fast setting and I’m trying to herd cats who decided not to play nice. In the end, at least two of us were frustrated and only I had the benefit of ameliorating it with a stiff drink.

Even then, I posted it to Instagram without that context. “Look at my sweet kids!”

It’s a funny story many of us can relate to but one that certainly highlights how looks aren’t always everything. That carrot top in the picture looks great though, doesn’t it?

One More Layer

That meme tells a valuable story at one layer yet there are actually two stories here. We covered the first already. Make sure you understand what success really is.

The second lesson is to not trust simple memes like this because rabbits don't typically eat the carrot root. So which rabbit is really more successful?

You see, when a gardener complains that rabbits ate their carrots, it's because they LOVE the leafy greens and rarely eat the carrot itself. Thanks to Bugs Bunny, we imagine rabbits crunching into a bright orange carrot, but when I was a kid raising rabbits, it was about the last thing they'd eat if given other options. The greens were their preference.

So which rabbit is more successful? The one with the leafy greens or the one who is chasing what the entertainment industry has told them they should chase?

Defining Success

Once we tease apart the very definition of success we can start to look at what we are measuring ourselves against. In a weird twist of irony, the probability that my children will even remember the time and circumstances behind that cute sunset photo is very low. Thirty years from now they’ll likely treat it like most others as an idyllic, sweet, and heartwarming shot of sibling love. At least I hope so. It’s amazing how reality can be woven out of our perceptions.

This is where, as a leader or otherwise, challenging the assumptions of how your team or organization measures success is so important. In my technical background of Operations Research, we like to apply three layers of metrics:

1. Measures of Outcome - A crucial qualitative measure that really answers what you want in the end.

2. Measures of Effectiveness - A blend of qualified and quantified measures that help ascertain and add fidelity to the measures of outcome

3. Measures of Performance - Typically quantified and higher fidelity of the fractional steps to achieve the effectiveness to achieve the outcomes.

To determine which rabbit is more successful with which carrot we have to ascertain the outcome. Is it a carrot competition or is it food for their dinner? Once we have the outcome defined, we can pick apart the effectiveness. How big of a carrot needs to win, or how many greens do they want for dinner? This layer then decomposes into what type of carrot to plant, what kind of soil and water you need, etc.

Without the measures of outcome defined clearly, we could argue all day as to which rabbit is more successful. Yet it would be irrelevant. Without a good idea of the outcome, neither of them is very successful because their work isn’t tied to something that matters enough for them to define it.

Back to that cute picture of my kids. My outcome was that I wanted a photo of the three of them doing something cute. I fully recognize that it wasn’t as idyllic at the moment but I can’t look at that photo and feel that angst for long. It’s a cute frickin’ picture. When my kids move out, I’ll probably print that photo, frame it, and give it to them.

And that opens up a much more challenging question on success and that is what was sacrificed in the short term, both positively and negatively, to get that outcome?

Summary

The layers of success and the positive outcomes that can come from rough starts and vice-versa are crucial to acknowledging, understanding, and aligning with what you really want.

It’s also important to sit back and muck around in those layers and see what you learn about yourself and the situations. I really wanted an idyllic photo session with my kids and they barely cooperated. I can now choose whether I imprint that picture with frustration or whether I continue to use it to promote a positive sibling relationship. (they really do get along very well in general)

In the end, there isn’t a great answer to true success. I think it’s more about whether you’re getting to where you want and, most importantly, that you’re considering a few more implications about how you measure it. The only wrong answer is to have no idea why you’ve selected measures of success.

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