⇥ Success and infinity

I had a coffee last night with an old friend who happened to be in town for the weekend when an unusual question came up: do you, he asked, consider yourself successful?

It took me a while to come up with an answer I was satisfied with. The problem, of course is how you define success.

If success is a status—as in, “I’ve achieved my goals”—then I don’t consider myself successful, and I think that success is very dangerous. As a businessperson, you have to be always a little unhappy with the way things are—there always has to be some room for improvement, or some other external factor (such as a competitor gaining ground, or changes in your market’s makeup) that can stimulate you to stay you on top of things, and force you to grow and evolve. If you ever find yourself thinking you’re king of the world, you need to either snap out of it or find someone to replace you, because the only direction you can go from being numero uno is down (particularly when reality doesn’t jive with your belief—which is almost always the case). As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, I think of disruption as my main job—and I can’t disrupt unless I think something is not quite right.

The Right Kind of Success
On the other hand, if you think of success as a position—as in, “I’m happy where I am”—then I think of myself as quite successful, but that becomes more of a personal feeling than something that can easily be quantified to someone else. In fact, what constitutes success for one person—say, starting a family—could look like a complete disaster to another.

In any case, the main characteristic of this kind of “success” is the fact that it is not a stationary state of existence. Regardless of whether you like having kids, traveling around the world or holding on to your dream job, you have to work to ensure that your success continues to exist and evolve. Thus, success becomes a motivator for growth and improvement, rather than an excuse for idleness.

Success and Infinity
I think of these two types of success the way a mathematician and an engineer think of infinity.

To an engineer, infinity is almost always a matter of supreme indifference. Since, by definition, it cannot be quantified, any calculation that leads to infinity has no real practical use. In other words, infinity is just a number big enough (or small enough) not to matter.

For a mathematician, infinity is a fascinating number. It is difficult to define and impossible to achieve—a constant source of marvel and opportunities the math guy never gets tired of.