Why the Success You Earned Can’t Give You the Life You Want | (#096) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Inner Life of Success, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Sometime in the past year or so, you did the math and it hit you—you got the income that your younger self would have called rich, the title that he would have shown off proudly, the condo, the reputation, the freedom to say no to things that you didn’t want to do. Every goal that he set, you hit, but the feeling that came with noticing all that wasn’t pride. It was closer to nothing.

Most people treat that flatness as a sign that they haven’t done enough yet, so they set a bigger target or they raise the number, or they find the next mountain because the last one clearly didn’t do it. I think that’s exactly backwards. That flat feeling isn’t a sign that you’ve fallen short. It’s the first honest thing that your success has ever told you. [00:52.6]

So, here’s what I want to give you in this episode. By the end, you’ll know exactly why hitting every target left you cold. It’s not that you lack drive—you obviously don’t—and it’s not that you forgot to keep a gratitude journal or anything. It’s one specific belief that you’re carrying, a belief that’s so powerful almost everyone who succeeds ends up holding it.

I’m going to show you the belief, walk you through the argument for why it’s actually false, and show you what becomes possible once you put it down. This one belief decides whether anyone gets to connect with you at any depth. It decides whether an ordinary good day can actually satisfy you or whether it just slides off. It decides whether the next 10 years gives you anything that the last 10 didn’t.

There’s a study that we’ll get to later, the longest one of its kind ever done that followed people for over 80 years. It found that how satisfied you are in your close relationships in midlife predicts your health and happiness decades later better than your cholesterol does, your relationships, not your portfolio, not your title, or your status. This belief that you’re carrying is what’s secretly strangling them. [02:01.6]

Now, let me tell you what the belief is, because said out loud, it sounds completely reasonable. It goes something like this: “I earned this, so I deserve it. And because I deserve it, having it should feel like something amazing.”

I want you to notice that this doesn’t sound like an error. It sounds like fairness. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. You put in the work. You took the risks. You stayed late when everyone else went home, and you came out ahead. So, of course, you earned it. Of course, you deserve it. Anyone who tells you otherwise sounds like they’re making excuses for the people who just didn’t do the work.

So, I’m not going to tell you that that belief is stupid or greedy or anything, or that you’re a bad person for holding it. In fact, I’m not going to attack that belief at all. I’m going to agree with it right now out loud, and then take it apart one piece at a time, slowly enough that you can check each piece for yourself as we go along. [02:59.4]

So, let’s start by agreeing, you worked hard. Nobody’s going to pretend otherwise. You sacrificed things that other people weren’t willing to sacrifice. You stayed in when your friends went out. You took the risks that made them feel nervous, and you beat people who started with the same shot that you had, people who were in the same room with the same options, who just didn’t do what you did. If the game were fair, and in your case, a lot of it was, then the winner earned the prize. That’s not arrogance. That’s how a fair game is supposed to work. You earned it through effort and striving, so the rewards are your due. I mean that. Okay, let that stand.

Now, with that granted, let’s do something very simple. I want to take your success apart into the actual pieces that produced it, not to explain it away, but just to look at each piece more honestly and ask it a plain question: “Did you supply this or was it supplied to you?” [04:01.3]

Yeah, let’s start with the first piece. Let’s take your raw intelligence, your temperament, whether you run hot or calm, whether you push or wait, your baseline health, the body that you get to work with. Look at all those honestly. Every one of them was already there before you had decided a single thing. Before you had made one choice worth crediting, they were already sitting there, handed to you. You didn’t supply them. You woke up as a small child, and they were already yours.

Okay, take the second piece, the start that you were given, and here, let’s be more careful, because a lot of you had starts that maybe were not soft starts. Maybe your parents left everything they knew behind. Maybe they walked away from a whole country, a language, a life that they understood, and crossed a border so that you would have options that they were never offered. That’s not luck in the lazy sense. That was somebody else’s sweat and somebody else’s fear. [05:05.2]

But look at where you sat in it. You didn’t earn that sacrifice. You couldn’t have earned it. You weren’t even maybe born yet or just very small when it all started. It was already in motion, being paid for before you existed or became fully conscious of what was happening with the context to deserve any of it. Whatever your particular start was, whether it was easy or brutal, or somewhere in between, you didn’t pick it and you didn’t build it. It was the ground that you found yourself standing on.

Watch what just happened, just in these two steps. We started with a big confident claim, “I made my success,” and I haven’t argued with that, not even once. I’ve agreed with every fair thing in it, but the claim itself has gradually gotten smaller. It’s gone from “I made my success” to something more like “I did well with what I was handed with the cards that were dealt me,” and that’s not nothing. [06:11.4]

Doing well with what you’re handed is a genuine thing, but it is a much more modest thing than the original story that you walked in with, and notice I didn’t have to trick you into any of that. Each step was just obviously true on its own. You supplied none of your starting equipment. You supplied none of your starting position. You granted both of those, because there’s no other honest way to do it. There’s no honest way not to grant that, okay, which leaves one big piece, the piece that you’re maybe proudest of, and the piece that you’re absolutely certain is yours, because you can feel the cost of it in your body, in your nervous system—your hard work. [06:56.2]

Okay, and here I can hear the objection forming, because I’ve made it myself. It goes something like this: “Fine, David, you got me on the talent. I didn’t hand myself my own brain. And, sure, the timing was luck, being the right person in the right decade. I’ll give you both of those. But don’t you dare take the hard work. Nobody else got up at five in the morning for 20 years on my behalf. Nobody else sat with that fear, the uncertainty. That part, the effort, that was all mine.”

Okay, that’s the strongest version of the objection and I want you to feel how solid it is before I reply, because that’s the wall that the whole thing will rest on. If the effort is yours, free and clear, then at least some of the credit survives. So, let’s look at the effort honestly, the same way we looked at all the rest, gradually, one piece at a time. Start with a question that very few people ask: “Where did your capacity to work that hard come from?” Not the work itself, but the capacity for it, the thing in you that could get up at 5:00 a.m. when your body wanted to stay resting. [08:08.1]

You talk about drive like it’s the one thing that we manufacture ourselves, but the great philosopher John Rawls made a point decades ago that’s really hard to shake once you’ve realized it, and Michael Sandel, the great philosopher at Harvard, has been pressing this ever since. Rawls said the distribution of effort is every bit as arbitrary as the distribution of talent. Your ability to strive was handed to you the same way your height was, and the scientific research bears this out in a way that’s almost uncomfortable when you see it.

Studies of twins, and there are a lot of these twin studies, have found that how hard you push is itself partly inherited. The very trait that we celebrate the loudest, the one that we call grit, turns out to be the level of your genes, almost the same thing as a personality trait psychologists call conscientiousness. In fact, the overlap between the two is enormous. [09:07.4]

So, a big share of your famous work ethic was sitting in you at birth before you had earned a thing. And the part that the genes didn’t supply? Your family did. Somebody taught you early on that you earn your place by grinding for it, hustling for it. Maybe they taught you that gently. Maybe they taught you that hard, harshly, strictly. But you didn’t sit down at four years old and choose that lesson on your own and discover this for yourself. It was poured into you before you could weigh it, the same way you didn’t choose your blood type.

Being proud of your work ethic, when you look at it honestly from a scientific perspective, is a little like being proud of being O negative or proud of having blonde hair or red hair, all perhaps useful, all perhaps rare, maybe, but none of it was your doing. [10:01.3]

So, sit with where we’ve arrived at here. The intelligence that you were born with, you didn’t make. The era in time in history that you were born into, you didn’t pick, and the drive that you brought to all of that was itself handed to you by your genes and by the people who raised you. Not one piece of it, so far, traces back to something that you created out of nothing. Told you I’d agree with your belief and then take it apart, right? So, here’s where we are. The belief that you deserve all this, that you are the author of it, has gradually run out of things to point to.

But maybe you’re willing to let that all go and still not feel the sting of it. “Fine,” you might say. “So, I didn’t build every last piece of myself from scratch. Who cares? I still have the income. I still have the win. I still have the portfolio. Let me just enjoy it.” [11:00.0]

Okay, that’s what I want to look at now, because I don’t think you can enjoy it. I don’t think the win is doing for you what you originally assumed it would or what others promised you it would, and I want to show you why, and it has nothing to do with whether you deserve it. 

The great author, philosopher, professor, C. S. Lewis wrote something about pride that took me years to understand, but once I understood it, I saw it everywhere in my own life. He wrote that pride is competitive by its very nature. Okay, this wasn’t just sometimes, but by its very nature. All the other vices, he wrote, can bump into each other by accident, but pride only ever gets pleasure out of having more than the next person. You’re not proud of being rich. You’re proud of being richer. You’re not pleased that you’re smart. You’re pleased that you’re smarter than that other person. Sit with that, because it’s a lot stranger than it first sounds. [12:03.1]

It means the money in your account is not actually the thing you’re enjoying. What you’re enjoying is the distance, the gap between your number and that other guy’s number. The income itself just sits there, but the gap is what gives you the little hit. This is scientifically proven now.

Now follow that one step further. If the pleasure lives in the gap, then the pleasure only exists when there’s someone to measure against, which means the moment you’re alone with what you have, truly alone, then the pleasure has nothing to feed on. There’s no gap in an empty room. There’s just you and the thing that you won on its own, but the thing itself was never what moved you to do it—and that I think is the flat feeling I opened with. Remember that? [12:54.2]

You hit every target your younger self set for you, but it landed like nothing. Here’s why—nobody was standing next to the targets. You got there, and then you looked around to measure, but there was no one to measure against, so the achievement just sat there, inert, the way the money just sits there in the room.

A person who can only enjoy being ahead can’t enjoy anything at all in a room when he’s by himself, and here’s the cruel or aspect of this—the very people who could fill that room, who could actually be with you in it, you won’t let in, because to a mind that’s always comparing, other people aren’t actually company. They’re either rivals to beat or rulers to measure yourself against, and you can’t be close to a ruler and you can’t rest with a rival.

So, even if you win, even if you get what you’ve been working so hard for, you end up ahead, but at the same time, you end up alone with everyone else at a cold distance. [14:04.6]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Now I’ve just handed you a fairly grand claim from a professor in an armchair at Oxford. C. S. Lewis saw all this by looking inward and thinking really hard, and that’s worth something, but it isn’t proof. You’d be right to push back and say, “That’s one clever man’s hunch about human nature. Why should I bet my life on it?” [15:13.0]

So, let’s leave the armchair and go into the laboratory, because psychologists have gone and measured the things that Lewis only described. There’s a famous researcher named Jennifer Crocker who studied what she calls “contingent self-worth.” The idea is simple. You can stake your sense of your own worth on winning in some particular area—maybe it’s your work or your looks, or your bank balance or portfolio size—and when you do that, something measurable happens. Your self-esteem starts to ride up and down with every win and every loss in that area.

A good quarter, and you feel like you’re worth something. A bad quarter, and you feel like you’re worthless. You’ve tied your value to a scoreboard, and now the scoreboard gets to vote, really, just tell you whether you’re allowed to feel like a worthy person, and here’s what her research found in the data—that way of living carries a cost. [16:13.8]

It costs you in your relationships. It costs you in your ability to learn, because failure becomes so threatening that you can’t afford to look at it. It costs you in your sense of running your own life and it costs you in plain mental health. The chasing itself does the damage, whether or not you win.

Now, you might think, At least when I do win, I get relief. Okay, you do, but the relief is smaller and shorter than you would expect. Studies show that looking down at someone below you, comparing so you come out on top, eases the anxiety for a moment, but it does so at a cost to the people that you’re measuring against, which is exactly the competitive engine that C. S. Lewis pointed out, now showing up on a spreadsheet. He described it. The researchers caught it. [17:08.8]

Let me give you one more piece from a very different corner. A psychoanalyst, a famous psychoanalyst named Melanie Klein spent her career studying envy, and she found something that most people get wrong. “Envy,” she wrote, “isn’t just wanting what somebody else has. It’s the angry feeling that another person is enjoying something good, and the pull to take it from them, or if you can’t take it, to spoil it, to wreck the good thing precisely because it’s good and it isn’t yours.”

Listen to that back and you will recognize the comparing mind at its worst. When your worth depends on being above other people, you can’t let anything good just stand there. You have to top it or own it, or secretly run it down. [18:00.0]

Melanie Klein said the opposite of envy is not calm and it isn’t being satisfied. The opposite of envy is actually gratitude, the plain ability to receive something good and enjoy it without needing to beat it, without needing to possess it, without needing to spoil it.

So, these aren’t two moods that pass through you. The scoreboard mind and the grateful mind are two opposite ways of standing toward everything good in your life, and you only get to pick one at a time, which is what Michael Sandel meant with this perceptive line, “A perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace, and every bit of the gratitude that would have come with it.” [18:50.3]

Let’s go back and finish the inspection that we started at the beginning. This whole time we’ve been hunting for something, the true author of the good in your life, the one who made it. We took your success apart, piece by piece, and we asked each piece, “Did you supply this or was it mostly supplied to you?” and every honest answer came back the same way.

So, who did supply it then? When you actually sit down and write the list, it’s long, and your own name is one small entry, probably near the bottom. The parents who walked away from everything they knew so that you would have options they never had or the teacher who saw something in you before you had done anything to prove it, or the friend who made that one introduction that changed your career, or the decade that you happened to be born into or where the tech cycle was in when you arrived at that age, the genes that you were handed—that’s what’s on the list. That’s what built the good in your life, and there’s a plain word for what that list describes to you: grace. [20:01.2]

Grace just means receiving something good that you didn’t earn and didn’t deserve, just the plain fact that most of what matters in your life arrived as a gift and that was true the entire time that you were insisting that you made it yourself.

Now, I know how this might sound so far. It might sound like a demotion, like I’ve spent, I don’t know, almost half an hour taking things away from you, but I want to show you that it’s the opposite. Okay, and this is what took me the longest to understand. Learning that you didn’t author your success doesn’t take the success away from you. The money is still in the account. The assets are still in the portfolio. The wins still happened. You lose nothing that was ever actually there. What you get back is the thing that the whole “I did it all myself” story secretly stole from you—the ability to be truly grateful. [21:01.5]

Gratitude is not just a nicety or some Instagram slogan. Gratitude is the thing that lets any of it sink in. It’s the proper doorway that all the enjoyment and the fulfillment have to come through. You can’t thank anyone for something that you’re dead certain you did alone, so the person who insists that he built it all by himself has locked the one door that the good stuff was trying to get in through.

There’s something almost comical about it, okay, when you take a step back and look at it, a person spending 30 years insisting he did the whole thing himself, jaw set, taking no help and no credit for anyone else, while the plain accounting shows that most of it was quietly handed to him the entire time, but he was just too busy to look up and notice. [21:53.0]

This isn’t only just a nice way to feel. It’s scientifically measured. In controlled study after controlled study, people who practice gratitude, who actually sit down and take stock of what they’ve been given, end up with better moods. They sleep better. They report fewer physical ailments and they make more progress on their own goals than the people who spend their time listing their hassles or comparing themselves to those below them. Gratitude is tied directly to building and keeping relationships, and in many ways, the relationships are the whole point.

There’s a study out of Harvard University that’s been following people for almost 90 years now, and when the researchers looked at what predicted who would be healthy at 80 years old, it actually wasn’t cholesterol at 50 years old. It was how satisfied people were in their close relationships. [22:52.1]

Their summary, after eight decades of data, is about as blunt as science ever gets. The single best predictor of a happy and healthy life is the quality of your close relationships—and the ability to receive what you didn’t earn is the very same ability that lets another person get close to you, form a deep connection with you. Every link in that chain has been measured.

Okay, let’s pull the whole thing together, because we’ve come a long way from where we started. We started with a belief that sounded like plain fairness. “I earned this, so I deserve it,” and deserving it should feel amazing, and I promised that I would not attack it, I would just inspect it, and so we did.

We took your success apart, piece by piece, and we went looking for anything in it that you had made out of nothing, the intelligence, the starting position, even the drive itself, your work ethic, how hard you work, and there was nothing. Not one piece traced back to you alone, or even to you primarily or mostly, not even the effort that you were proudest of. [24:10.6]

Then we watched what that belief does to you when you hold on to it anyway. It can only give you pleasure by comparison, so the win goes hollow the second you’re alone with it, and the people who could actually connect with you on this, you can’t get near, and they can’t get near you because you keep turning them into rivals or rulers. That’s why winning felt like nothing. That’s why the room feels empty.

The antidote isn’t another win. The antidote is actually gratitude, and the scientific studies back that up. But gratitude asks one thing of you first, the one thing that the belief will not allow. You have to admit that most of what’s good in your life was given to you. [24:59.1]

Now, I don’t teach this from a clean distance or from a high pedestal looking down, alright. I ran this belief further than many people ever will. I built a whole persona, a whole career on being impressive in various ways, and underneath it, though, I couldn’t have told you this at the time because I didn’t realize it then, I had made a kind of private deal with the universe. If I could just become somebody in the eyes of the people that I looked up to or cared about, then I would finally deserve to be loved.

That was the unconscious arrangement. Love was the prize at the end of the achievement. So, I chased it the way I chased everything else. I tried to earn it, and then when that whole system fell apart, it took me somewhere very dark, dark enough that I’m here talking to you as someone who came back from the precipice, from a place that a lot of people don’t. [25:52.6]

What turned it around wasn’t some kind of comeback story, it wasn’t a new win. It was, remarkably, a baby, a friend’s infant daughter, my goddaughter, whom I had agreed to help look after since the time she was just a couple months old, and this tiny person could do absolutely nothing for me. She couldn’t be impressed by my résumé either. She couldn’t keep score. She couldn’t pay me back for a single thing.

In fact, she could spit up on me. She could scream in my face at 3 a.m., and it would change absolutely nothing in what I felt for her, and I noticed that unconditional love flowing from me, never ending, and I noticed that for the first time in my adult life, love and earning had come apart in my hands. She hadn’t earned my love and I had not earned hers, and it was the most complete thing I’d ever felt.

That is the whole lesson and it took me nearly dying to learn it. You can earn a fortune, but you can’t earn love. That’s the problem that you’ve been feeling, but you haven’t been able to put words to. [27:00.6]

So, now we arrive at a fork in the road, and let me tell you where each road goes.

Keep the belief, and here would be your future, a bigger target every, I don’t know, couple of years, because the last one didn’t give you the feeling, so surely the next one will. A calendar full of people who respect you, but empty of people who truly know you, and at the far end of it, a flawless record and a room with no one in it with you. You’ll have more money than you have now, but you’ll wake up to the same flat morning that you woke up to today.

Or you can put the belief down, and the same discipline that built the whole career, that ferocious ability to learn a hard thing and practice it until you’re good at it, gets pointed at something new, learning now to receive, learning to take in a gift without immediately trying to pay it back or top it. [27:53.3]

When you can do that, ordinary good days start showing up again, because you’re finally home when they arrive. People that you care about come closer, connect more deeply with you, because you’ve stopped unconsciously scoring them.

You already won the game that you knew how to play. You’ve had that trophy for a while now, but you’ve noticed it doesn’t warm you. This other thing, this is the game worth learning, and unlike that first one, the fact that you didn’t earn it isn’t the catch. It’s the whole point. [28:29.2]