Success Is a Dead End

Les Brown — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:02:47 +0000

‘Be careful what you pray for, ’cause you just might get it.’ Have you ever heard that saying? In my opinion, it so perfectly describes the pitfalls of adulthood. Keep in mind that I have what I think is quite a unique definition for ‘adulthood’: childhood without the parental constraints. The dreams of the young adult are very often a mixture of the soul’s passion with a child’s naieveté. It’s the latter that can land you in an emotional soup around the onset of the midlife transition.

Consider this quote from author Dan Millman (The Way of the Peaceful Warrior):

If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

The problem with achieving ‘success’ derives from the fact that, as an adult, your definition of ‘success’ is too limited. However, this realization doesn’t really hit home until midlife. If you’ve been successful, there’s a good probability that you’re going to (or already have) run into one of two unsettling situations. These come upon you when you’ve achieved a certain mastery in your field. In the first scenario, the pressure is immediately on you to surpass yourself. Not only do you have the face the onset of boredom (‘been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt), but you also quickly become aware that there are younger, brighter, even more ambitious people than you chasing behind you. What happens to your success when you’ve been overtaken by people more successful than you?

The second scenario can be even more painful. It occurs when your drive to succeed allows you to attain your highest goals. Only then do you have the opportunity to stop and look around. You may even allow yourself to feel your feelings about what you’ve achieved. Those pesky emotions tend to flood in around the onset of midlife. What happens to you when you look at your success and feel only disgust? Very often, when people have achieved their goals they discover that the achievement didn’t bring them what they thought it would or, even worse, that it did bring them what they thought it would, and it wasn’t what they really wanted, after all. The French have a great word to describe that feeling: ennui. It describes a feeling beyond boredom — all the way to emptiness.

Is there a cure for ennui? I think so, and midlife presents exactly the context we need to embark on it. You can only break open the dead end of success by redefining it for yourself. The superficial definitions that you inherited from your childhood need to be revisited. You need to go much more deeply into the bigger questions of life. This is essentially a spiritual quest, and can’t genuinely be satisfied by anything less. Until you’re prepared to take a serious look at the core purpose of your life, you’ll be left chasing after one unsatisfying ‘success’ goal after another. Your real purpose (I prefer the term ‘destiny‘) can’t be confined to a simple definition because, as Millman suggested our opening quote, ‘purpose’, ‘destiny’, and ‘success’ are all dynamic terms: they evolve even as you pursue them.

It takes courage to undertake a spiritual quest because it means giving up forever the hope of finding ‘the answer’. Every choice you make in life changes the question. Yet, on a truly spiritual quest, there’s no possibility of ennui because there’s no fixed ‘goal’ to attain. You can never become obsolete and surpassed by other younger, brighter, and more ambitious people, because your spiritual path belongs to you alone. You are the one and only expert in being you. Do you have what it takes to face the midlife challenge: to become the person you were always meant to be?

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

What Will Your Transition Cost?

Les Brown — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:13:46 +0000

On paper, it seems obvious that people should plan for a major shift in perspective that should occur just about the time they settle in to their relationships, their careers and their sense of personal achievement and well=being. That’s all very fine to speculate about before the fact. Yet, a huge problem arises around the question of midlife because a) you don’t know what you don’t know and b) the criteria that you use to evaluate your life before midlife are made obsolete by it. Midlife involves not only a paradigm shift, but a values shift, as well, and that’s what makes planning for it such a difficult assignment. Consider this: what good does it do you to calculate carefully the cost of driving your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) when you suddenly decide you want to sell it and ride a bicycle to work every day?

Right now, you’re planning and directing your future based on your specific life vision: in most cases, it’s something that’s been with you a very long time. That vision has been meticulously constructed over the course of your lifetime (up until now) and it provides you with an invaluable context in which you can live your life. From your vision, you derive a sense of purpose and direction, as well as your sense of what matters to you and what doesn’t. The ‘crisis’ of midlife comes upon you when, for a variety of reasons, that vision no longer speaks to you. You find yourself in the situation where all those things that used to matter most to you now don’t matter at all and things that you never even considered now appear as the most important things in your life.

When you, as an adult planning for the midlife transition, begin to take stock of what it’s going to take to get you through it successfully, you need to take into consideration the fact that your priorities will change — and change drastically. Under ordinary conditions, the next step after creating your basic plan of action would be to do a risk assessment (formal or informal). This involves, first of all, taking an inventory of things that could happen along the way that could deflect you from your goal. The assessment involves deciding just two things for each eventuality: 1) how likely each event might be, and 2) how seriously each event might negatively impact reaching your desired ends.

A problem of crisis proportions arises when your goals and values change. Suddenly, everything that was orchestrated to see those goals through to completion loses its meaning and purpose. Everything loses its importance, and everything (or almost everything) that had once seemed out of the question winds up back on the table again. Once your life has lost its core meaning and direction, what sense will anything else have? How do you perform a risk assessment to determine the importance of any aspect of the future direction of your life when your entire value system is in flux? Up until this point, you’ve assumed that you knew what was important to you and what not, but now all that is up for grabs. You can assume no longer.

Performing a valid risk assessment at middle age puts many men into a serious conundrum: many, for the first time in their lives, have to reevaluate the basic assumptions of life, from "What do I really want?" to "What is really right (or wrong) for me?" Whereas women had their cultural models handed to them in from the post World War II era popular culture (magazines, films, books, TV, etc.), and they’ve had over 60 years to critique and accept or reject them, men’s cultural models haven’t evolved nearly so drastically. Instead of the cultural revolution that women have fomented, men have been left to a more or less reactive role: trying to find how their cultural model ‘fits’ into a changing world. This has worked most often to their detriment.

Rather than critique their core views and values, men have too often either turned a blind eye to them, or put up some fairly severe emotional barriers to change. When masculinity is too rigidly defined as ‘Joe six pack’ or the ‘Blue Collar Comics’ ("Git ‘er done!"), then even exploring the deeper goals and values of life falls under a cultural taboo. And men pay a high price for this. When core values shift (as they must at midlife), and self-reevaluation is either culturally unsupported or even a taboo, the probability of suffering a true midlife crisis (and the disorientation that accompanies it) rises nearly to certainty. When your goals and values are gone, how do you plan? How do you calculate the risks of any potential course of action? Obviously, you can’t.

If you want to know in advance what your midlife transition is going to cost you, you’re going to have to be very clear about where you want to go and how you want to get there. It’s going to take focus, and it’s going to take embracing a bit of masculine counter-culture: being prepared to do some deep and hard self-examination. What are your core values? What are your motives? What’s really important to you? Until you’re ready to take the time and energy to engage yourself fully in this quest for personal meaning, the cost to you of an eventual midlife crisis may be too high to bear: it could cost you everything you hold near and dear and leave you with precious little apart from an empty or broken heart (yes, men have them, too). It’s a price you really don’t ever want to have to pay.

Midlife Mastery Journal » goals

Success Is a Dead End

What Will Your Transition Cost?