On Suc­cess

by Roberto

I share a story and some text I wrote twenty years ago.

It's the early evening of June 15, 2006. I'm sit­ting at my desk in Bo­gotá, idling away. Pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, as usual dur­ing this time of day. 

At the same time Hera Vla­makis, a post-doc from my lab, is serv­ing as teach­ing as­sis­tant in the Bac­te­r­ial Ge­net­ics course at Cold Spring Har­bor, New York. Out of the blue, Hera writes me an email.

The sub­ject line reads: "Ques­tion of the day."

The text of the mes­sage: "How do you mea­sure suc­cess?"

...

I wel­comed Hera's ques­tion. What fol­lows is my long-winded an­swer, my et­y­mo­log­i­cal hal­lu­ci­na­tion. Hope you'll find it en­ter­tain­ing.

...

Wow.

Short an­swer: What is suc­cess?

Long an­swer: (I hap­pen to not want to at­tend to mat­ters that need done and thus will go on and on and on and you need not read any fur­ther....)

Suc­cess means, in Eng­lish, ac­com­plish­ment of an aim or pur­pose. Ori­gin of word – from Latin suc­cedere which means to "come close af­ter." Thus, one suc­ceeds some­one else, or one is some­one else's suc­ces­sor. From that per­spec­tive "suc­cess" hap­pens, it is what comes next! There's no mea­sur­ing it; it sim­ply is what hap­pens. As in Span­ish – "Las cosas suce­den" – things hap­pen, things suc­ceed. No do­ing, no noth­ing. Every­thing is suc­cess sim­ply be­cause every­thing hap­pens. Why then does Eng­lish taint the word with a need of ac­com­plish­ment of an aim or pur­pose? Is it based on the false be­lief that we can ac­tu­ally do some­thing to al­ter out­comes? To make things hap­pen more than they oth­er­wise would? That we can play a ma­jor role in do­ing the things that hap­pen?

Okay, so suc­cess, the word, is a bad per­ver­sion... What other word? In Span­ish the word that trans­lates into the Eng­lish suc­cess is "éx­ito." Quite in­ter­est­ingly, that comes from the Latin "ex­i­tus" – a way out! From where Eng­lish gets "exit." Wow in­deed! In Span­ish to suc­ceed is to leave, to get out.

Suc­cess would then be mea­sured by how well one leaves! I love that, you see, be­cause the de­par­ture from this life is prob­a­bly the best mea­sure of suc­cess. Not the man­ner of de­par­ture but re­ally who we take our­selves to be upon de­part­ing. But be­ware of the mis­mea­sure upon de­par­ture. Put things in per­spec­tive. Take the case of Sir Isaac New­ton – some­one many might mea­sure as be­ing very suc­cess­ful. I love this quote of his on how he mea­sured his suc­cess:

"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to my­self, I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the sea-shore and di­vert­ing my­self in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­tier shell than or­di­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered be­fore me."

By all stan­dard mea­sures of suc­cess, New­ton was very suc­cess­ful. Yet upon ex­it­ing, he mea­sured his suc­cess as that of a lit­tle boy dis­tracted by a de­tail while the whole truth laid undis­cov­ered. That from the guy that set the world of quan­ti­ta­tive physics in mo­tion!

So... Per­haps we should not mea­sure suc­cess by what we might seem to be to the world. Rather, let the mea­sure of suc­cess man­i­fest it­self at the time of de­par­ture. In the mean­time, per­haps we would be wiser to let things suc­ceed one af­ter the other, with as lit­tle "do­ing" as pos­si­ble (do­ing here mean­ing at­tempt­ing to force things to come out as we think they should), sim­ply at­tend­ing to what is in front of us and act­ing from that knowl­edge.

In clos­ing, here's Bob Dylan's "suck­cess" flash card to un­der­score my hope that you find this post en­ter­tain­ing. The im­age is from an iconic video that is very much worth watch­ing (study­ing, even) in its en­tirety. Pay close at­ten­tion to how Dylan's char­ac­ter­is­tic nasal voic­ing makes the word suc­cess sound just like he spells it, adding to the hu­mor. I am grate­ful to Christoph for sug­gest­ing I use this.

Im­age cap­tured from Bob Dylan's 1965 video "Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues."