You’re Successful, So Why Don’t You Feel Good Enough? | (#111) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Questions Behind What You’re Building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Here’s something that most people don’t recognize about success and achievement. It’s that lasting happiness requires a clear conscience. To be able to enjoy your life, to enjoy the fruits of your labor, requires being able to live with yourself.

Now, that’s usually not what people strive so hard to achieve success for. Most people who strive for success actually are pursuing financial freedom or time freedom, having enough money to choose exactly how they spend their time, or maybe they’re striving for recognition of their accomplishments or their significance.

These benefits can matter. Someone struggling to pay rent has really good reasons to try to make more money, so those are perfectly fine reasons to start striving or start trying to achieve success. What I’m after is what actually allows you to enjoy the benefits of your hard work over the course of years and decades, for the rest of your life. [01:06.4]

If you don’t take to heart what I cover in this episode, even the success that you do earn will leave you with a background anxiety that will poison your enjoyment of any success that you have. It will eat away and undermine your life fulfillment and happiness, and you’ll never feel fully settled in your success. You’ll always be looking over your shoulder and insecure, comparing yourself constantly to the competition or constantly feeling the need to defend your position in the status hierarchy, or justifying yourself to yourself and to others.

Instead, what you want is what I’ll be covering in this episode, a clear conscience, where you can consider and reflect on how you live and what your choices do to others without having to excuse yourself, and I’m going to show you why success actually makes it so hard to enjoy your success. [01:55.0]

Yes, achievement can absolutely demonstrate skill or persistence, or good judgment in a particular activity, but we often give it far too much weight and we give it a much larger meaning, as if our position in the status hierarchy or in the thing that we’re successful at proves what we deserve, and that people with less must somehow deserve less. I’m going to attack that inference directly, and then explain its consequences for our happiness and fulfillment in life.

Now, I’m going to assume that the success you’ve got is earned and deserved. You studied. You practiced. You made the difficult decisions. You accepted uncertainty or risk, or you persisted when all of the others stopped or quit, and your actions, I will give you, contributed to whatever success ensued. So, right off the bat, I’ll grant you all of that, that hard work, the persistence, the ingenuity, your intelligence, all of it—but now let’s examine the person who was capable of taking those actions. [03:02.0]

Nobody chose their genetic inheritance. You just got the luck of the draw. It was just given to you at birth, and there’s a ton of research that shows that intelligence and many aspects of your personality—like how hardworking you are, how determined you are, how diligent you are, how much of an extrovert or introvert you are—are influenced, not determined by, but are largely influenced by that genetic inheritance.

It’s not like you first accomplished something to qualify or to get those starting advantages before you were born. You didn’t do something to deserve the genetic inheritance. You just got it. It really was the luck of the draw.

Now, this is very confronting, triggering to people who worked really hard for their success. We often don’t think about our genetic inheritance, because it’s actually obviously much harder for us to recognize that than if we had wealthy parents. A parent paying your university tuition is something that is clear and obvious, and something you’d remember. [04:06.0]

Maybe you remember solving this very difficult problem in your business, but receiving the capacity through which you solved that difficult problem isn’t obvious to you and it’s not something that appears to you as some kind of separate event that you can just point at, like, “That factor.” Your intelligence just feels like you, right? So does your personality or the temperament through which you approached this problem or these difficulties on the way to success.

These genetic advantages to you are as familiar as water is to fish. We don’t stop to question the water, our genetic inheritance, and we often don’t attribute any of our success to our genetic inheritance. We just take it for granted, and of course, this isn’t just your intelligence. It’s also other aspects of your personality that contributed to your success. [04:57.8]

Consider your ability to concentrate or your physical health, or your response to frustration or whether your experience taught you that effort could improve your circumstances. You exercised all of those capacities, of course, but you didn’t first earn your initial conditions, your starting position, through which you developed those capacities. Your effort absolutely helped to cause your success, but that does not establish that you earned everything that made your effort possible.

Beyond genetic inheritance, you also inherited a place in a historical moment. Imagine beginning life as a baby in a war-torn part of Sudan or the Congo or Gaza. Imagine that your consciousness first showed up as a baby in that war-torn place. Before you could even make your first consequential choice, your circumstances already determined much of what you had to work with and what you had to contend with for survival, for safety, for schooling, and the opportunities that would be available to you. [06:03.5]

You didn’t choose which baby you would be or who you would be born to, or what place you’d be born in or what time in history you were born in. Imagine you have an aptitude or genius for computer programming, but you were born in the 1700s or in a time in history when physical ability was much more valuable.

You could possess capacities or the potential for those capacities or skills or that genius that would only be valuable today in this modern context, and if it were a different time or place, you may not have the tools or the occupation or the market through which those capacities can be expressed in order to produce wealth. The world must supply an opportunity for an ability to become a special accomplishment that would be rewarded in this special way. [06:56.4]

Here’s another example—jazz music. I’m a huge fan of jazz. Think about how much money you could make as a great jazz musician now in 2026 versus being a similarly great jazz musician as skilled, but in the 1950s or the 1940s when jazz was the main type of music at that time in America, when jazz was the pop music before rock and roll.

At different times in history, the audience, the industry, the competition, the commercial potential or opportunities differ, so your skill, your excellence, your genius, and the ensuing rewards for that genius or that capacity, or the gift, are two separate things that depend largely on that particular time in history in which you have or don’t have those opportunities. The talent alone doesn’t determine its own market price. So, time and place in history are just two factors that go into your success. [07:53.8]

You also can think of what teachers you got growing up, if you had good teachers, or what your team consisted of, or your partners in your business or your employees if you were lucky to have good employees or partners, the family support you did or didn’t have, the accumulated knowledge that you could take advantage of, the functioning institutions that you could take advantage of, and just sheer timing.

So, this myth of meritocracy makes us believe that our success is a verdict on our deservingness or deservedness as a human being. Even if you eliminated all unfair competition, you eliminated nepotism, and you provided equal educational opportunities to everybody, society would still reward capacities that nobody chose to receive that you didn’t earn—your genetic inheritance, who you were born to, the time and place that you were born in, your personality, your intelligence—so, improving the competition or the fairness of it doesn’t establish that the results of that competition would measure your worthiness or your deservedness for that success. [09:05.2]

So, yes, you made the consequential choices that led to your success, but you didn’t choose the person who could make those choices. You didn’t choose to be that person. You didn’t choose the genetic inheritance that led you to be able to make those choices, and you did not choose to be born into the world that rewarded those choices. So, greater accomplishment or success, therefore, cannot by itself establish that you’re a more valuable human being as a result.

Now let’s tackle the even thornier problem. You might then grant me everything I’ve just covered, but here’s the next problem: you can acknowledge everything I’ve covered and still believe that the advantages that you were born with that you didn’t earn entitle you to dominate those who didn’t have these advantages. That’s actually how racial supremacy, racist supremacy, white supremacy works, right? So, being grateful for the things you didn’t earn, the privileges you didn’t earn, actually doesn’t answer how you should then behave. [10:07.1]

A white supremacist doesn’t need to believe they earned their white ancestry or a Japanese supremacist doesn’t need to believe they earned their Japanese ancestry. They can regard it as an accident of birth, the luck of the draw, and still claim that it somehow makes them superior. Recognizing the accident alone actually doesn’t address the moral error.

This logic also applies to wealth and achievement. A founder who is successful can acknowledge exceptional luck, while also treating his commercial success as giving him the authority to tell everyone else how they should live. Or someone who has inherited their wealth can acknowledge having earned none of that fortune in their trust fund, while also treating less wealthy people as somehow less deserved, less consequential, less worthy. [11:01.7]

Someone with much smaller advantages can still make the same mistake when dealing with, I don’t know, a blue-collar worker or a service worker, or a person who depends on them. This is the snobbishness, the small snobbishness of the lower class, looking down on those who are even lower to make themselves feel better.

So, obviously, another human being’s well-being doesn’t count for less merely because the luck of the draw gave them less money or less ability, or less intelligence or less security, or less power. Your favorable position was due to the luck of the draw—so, if the dice had gone the other way, their less favorable position could just as well have been yours. [11:44.0]

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 we come to one of the most important concepts of ethical theory, introduced by John Rawls, perhaps the most influential moral philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls, and his now classic text, A Theory of Justice. What is the key to determining the moral right from wrong? It comes from this key concept—the veil of ignorance. [12:53.5]

Imagine choosing the rules that people should live under before discovering which person you will be. So, you don’t yet know your inherited wealth or what your genetic allotment will be. You don’t know what family you’ll be born into or what race, or what your health conditions will be or your intelligence, or your social status.

From behind that veil of ignorance, you then choose. You cannot reserve the most advantageous position for yourself. You don’t know what luck of the draw you will get. You don’t know which way the dice will go for you or what hand you’ll be dealt. That’s three metaphors right there. This veil of ignorance prevents your present position from supplying its own unconscious justification.

So, when you might be the person that’s exploited, the protection against exploitation becomes a lot more important. When you are the one with less consideration because you have less standing, equal standing now becomes a lot more consequential to you, right? It makes a lot more sense, right? This forces you to consider terms that you can accept without relying on just being powerful enough to escape those consequences. [14:04.8]

Now, John Rawls was, of course, focusing on principles that govern society. Our focus in this episode is more narrow and smaller, and this is about the personal choices that you make that would lead to your success, right? So, when it comes to your personal choices, and these personal choices, let’s say, affect other people, what you should do is consider this from behind the veil of ignorance. Consider what you could endorse without knowing which affected person you would be—so, this is, in many ways, a kind of more sophisticated version of the “do unto others,” right?

Let’s take a very innocuous example of tipping a good bellhop. Right, so imagine that you were the bellhop. What kind of tip would you appreciate if you put that much effort into it, that much care, or that much service into that bellhop service, right? You’d have to examine the recognition that that service on its own warrants, without assuming that you are the guest instead of the worker. [15:04.7]

When it comes to your investments, consider both the return and how it’s produced, accounting for the people who end up bearing the consequences of that business’ practices or what you do to that business. Ask whether the governing practices of the business are defensible when you might be not the investor, but an employee or the customer, or an affected resident near that physical location of the business instead of you being the investor.

When it comes to political and social causes, consider whether you’d endorse those principles that you’re supporting without knowing your wealth or your race, or your citizenship or your influence. Apply the same scrutiny when that cause benefits your own group.

So, now this forces you to pause, right? You’d have to first establish the facts. You’d have to identify who benefits and who bears the costs, and then you’ve got to remove the assumption that you occupy your current favorable position and, instead, judge it from behind the veil of ignorance. [16:07.1]

Now, why is this so important psychologically? Why would this contribute to unhappiness or a lack of fulfillment, or that background anxiety that eats away at you like a poison and undermines your enjoyment of whatever success you’ve got in the long run?

Imagine the person who claims that the advantages that he got that were undeserved prove his deserved superiority, and he authorizes or approves of and supports exploitative or lesser treatment of others in less favorable positions. Right? That person recognizes how much they received without earning it, and they also recognize that their treatment wouldn’t survive impartial judgment from behind the veil of ignorance. Yet they continue to claim superiority. [16:54.2]

What does this mean psychologically? If they’re intelligent, it means that they’re maintaining a pretense, a façade, a lie, a lie that they can themselves recognize. It leads to a lifelong background anxiety, a feeling like an impostor. They know they didn’t earn it, but they’ve got to act and think as if they did.

Now, short-term pleasure and a bad conscience obviously can coexist, but only in the short term. So, more money, more admiration, more influence over the long term cannot erase their brain. They know that they are hypocrites, that they are living a lie, that they have to exert this psychological energy with this background anxiety to maintain that pretense that they recognize themselves—and over the years, avoiding that recognition, that objection, requires repeated excuses and a kind of selective attention, a kind of cognitive dissonance.

So, lasting fulfillment requires being able to examine your life, look at yourself in the mirror, without having to hide the consequences of your judgment from yourself, and there is a lot of unease and anxiety in this state. It’s psychologically taxing and draining to be a bad person. There is a great pain to the grandiose ego. [18:11.5]

If your worth depends on outranking others, then someone else’s success will always feel like a reduction in your own worth, so you won’t actually ever have any true friends, and a setback can seem to or feel like it’s exposing you. An insufficient recognition can feel like a deep injury that hurts 10x more. You can possess all of these enormous advantages and, at the same time, remain completely preoccupied, worried, anxious, afraid of having to defend your position over and over and over.

Now, the solution to this is moral goodness, right? Recognizing that all human beings have equal worth means that you don’t have to demonstrate your superiority in order to deserve your respect. Choosing impartially from behind the veil of ignorance allows you to respect what you do, how you live, without having to claim some greater importance than the people who were adversely affected by those choices. [19:12.8]

Now you can get to real, true gratitude, not the gratitude of the racial supremacist, but instead, an ability to appreciate your skills, your intelligence, your opportunities, your friendships, your family, your financial advantages, without having to pretend that you earned the existence of these or your own existence. You can finally enjoy your success without having it certify your human worth. You no longer need someone else to be beneath you in order for you to feel good about your life or who you are, or your standing.

Okay, so to recap so far, the point is that your capacities and your circumstances, the place and point in history in which you were born, all of these were unearned. Okay, so recognizing your luck doesn’t determine, though, whether you will behave morally or whether you’ll experience gratitude or happiness, or fulfillment. [20:07.1]

A way out of this trap is this concept from moral philosophy called the veil of ignorance, where the veil tests your choices, your consequential choices, without allowing your position to excuse them. Judging and determining and making decisions from behind that veil of ignorance enables the clear conscience that lasting happiness and fulfillment requires.

I learned this the hard way. When you’re in the one-up position, you don’t think about these things. When you’re in that successful position, when life is going your way, you don’t think about the little guy or the person who is less advantaged, until you’re betrayed or you get screwed over, or until you’re in the less favorable position, and then you really appreciate moral philosophy. You really appreciate justice and fairness. [20:56.5]

When I was the one-up and everything was going well and smoothly, and I was getting all my goals, I still had that background anxiety that I always, the next day, had to do it over again to maintain and keep my status in or whatever it is that that success that I cared about was—because there’s always competition and every day is a new challenge, and there’s that background anxiety of always having to run on that treadmill to keep in place, really.

But when things are going well and you’re up, you don’t think about those for whom things are not going that well. You don’t think about those people naturally, until you’re faced with reality when things stop going well. When you’re humbled, you become the little guy, you can then appreciate from that vantage point why it’s so important to have fairness and compassion, and a conscience.

Now, when I get back to the up position, I could then forget what I discovered through my experience of being in the down, but I would only be able to do that with cognitive dissonance, which would always be in the back of my mind, eating away at me as that feeling of being an impostor, and that that fate could come for me again with that anxiety, because that background anxiety is your conscience talking. [22:12.8]

You can spend decades of your life working really hard to acquire more, achieve more, while trying to defend to yourself this claim to superiority, but if you’re intelligent, you know you cannot justify it. It’s even worse when it comes to your relationship or connection to other people, because other people keep becoming your competitors or your threats, or people whose interests you need to discount to look down on.

The advantages can accumulate while your ability to enjoy the life that they produce, the success that you get, ends up feeling like a lie, because it is, because you are actually an impostor thinking you deserved it all when, in fact, you know that you didn’t. [22:56.4]

The key isn’t just acknowledging that, because, like I said, the white supremacists acknowledge that and then still feel grateful, and then lord it over others. The racial supremacy thing is actually a really bad example because race doesn’t make you superior in any way. It should be more like having been born with wealth or intelligence or something, but I’m throwing that in there just to get your attention and to see that this actually logically also applies to that case, and hopefully, just thinking about it in that sense shows you how morally abhorrent that is.

So, what to do about it? It’s to choose from behind the veil of ignorance—so, continue building, earning, learning, pursuing worthwhile ambitions, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Enjoy what those activities provide for you, the success that comes, without requiring them to prove that thereby you matter more, or thereby you are somehow superior.

If your choices affect other people, choose according to principles that you would accept, even before knowing what position you are going to be in. You will thereby be able to appreciate your good fortune with a clear conscience. So, lasting happiness requires a clear conscience. [24:09.7]

When your choices affect other people, choose according to principles that you would accept without knowing what your status or position would be ahead of time. You can then enjoy your advantages that you didn’t earn, without pretending that they somehow make you superior, and you’ll be able to respect yourself genuinely, authentically, without any kind of pretense or lies, and without needing anyone to be beneath you or less than you in order for you to feel good about yourself.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment. Send me a message. I’d love to get your feedback. If you like this, hit a like on whatever platform you’re listening to this on, and if this has helped you in any way, please send it to anyone else that you think could benefit from it.

Thank you again so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [24:54.8]