In the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, a crowd of warlords and warriors are celebrating their latest victory when an elder chieftain silences their festivities with a single question: “This is good … but what is best in life?”
One warrior offers up an answer: “The open steppe, a fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.”
“Wrong!” the elder proclaims. “Conan, what is best in life?”
As the camera zooms dramatically onto Conan, he pronounces his well-rehearsed, winning definition of success:
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!”
This famous movie line was inspired by the real-world barbarian and warlord Genghis Khan, who is known to have said the following:
“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”
Here, then, is one idea of success, proclaimed to us by barbarians and conquerors and what in some circles we might call ‘great men.’
These great men drove history. They changed the world. They came, they saw, they conquered. They left their marks. They were movers and shakers. They were feared, respected, admired, hated. What they were not was inconsequential. Their very names ring in our ears to this day, centuries later, as metonymies for triumph, for conquest, for history itself. They are more than men — they are monuments. And so, if the memory of posterity is any indicator, these monumental men were triumphant successes.
But permit me to ask: what are they monuments to, exactly? If they were men of consequence, real consequence, do we little people have any right to interrogate those consequences? If they changed history, what was history before and what was it after, and can we qualify that change as an improvement? It is not only the size of the marks they left behind but the nature of them that concern me. In short, how do we evaluate these great men?
The trouble is that the lives of these historic men are so great, they are almost beyond assessment. Strangely, such impossibility of assessment is often taken to be a selling point — that they are ‘beyond good and evil’ is somehow seen as a ‘good’ thing. How can we judge Genghis Khan’s entire legacy, which left a trail of pillaged villages and dead bodies from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific yet, some say, also united disparate tribes, and whose distant progeny include up to 16 million people living today? Likewise, what is the worth of a Napoleon, or a Caesar, or an Alexander the Great?
These lives are so big, with consequences so vast, that we are still under the grip of those consequences centuries later. Their worth could not even now be determined, after all these years, because to judge their choices, we’d have to judge ourselves as products of their choices. We might as well try to leap out of our own skin.
Yes, if bigness of scope is our marker of success, these men of history are no doubt our models of it. But as you can see, bigness leaves a big mess. If we step outside of quantity and into quality — that is, if we begin not merely to count and measure, to think in bulk and mass and size and scope, but begin instead to evaluate, to discern between good and bad — we are left with a much less strident sense of certainty about these great men. They begin to seem not great but crazed, less like monuments of history and more like idols to megalomania.
And so, greatness — in the sense of size, proportion, quantity of effect — remains a distinctly ambivalent term. One could be a great barbarian, a prodigious rapist, a monumental murderer of men, women, and children. If greatness refers only to quantity, we ought to ask, ‘quantities of what?’ before we begin to heap our praise.
What we see in the line of questioning above is that there might be a distinction between great men and good men. It need not be a mutually exclusive definition. There certainly might be great men who are good men, and I hope there have been and will be. But in our rush to be men of consequence in the world, men of renown and recognition, men of action, men of material means, men who leave a mark, we ought to actually stop and think, what sorts of marks are we leaving? Other than sheer size and scope, what is the shape of our lives?
In all these questions, we are brought to the ultimate question, the question, I believe, that will give us our answer not only to the question of success, but also to the question of life, an answer which will ultimately determine the kind of person we are. That question lies at the center of moral inquiry: what is good? How do we define it? What is truly best in life?
Is success good?
Success has two definitions, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
“The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.”
“The gaining of fame or prosperity.”
A more archaic definition is listed at the bottom of the entry, which defines success as “a result or an outcome.”
As usual, the archaic definition turns out to be the accurate one. It is not that I have an arbitrary preference for the artifacts of the past, but it so happens that the later incarnations of the word “success” are derivative upon their original, obscuring a fuller meaning in favor of a more limited and ultimately more misleading one. The modern definitions of success take for granted certain assumptions, certain cultural sediment, that the original concept does not.
Let us move through our three definitions of success, starting with the first entry, and take a closer look. Across all three definitions, an entire history of thought comes to light.
“The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted” —
this seems a workable definition of success. But look closer, and we find that the very word “achievement” is an implicit term of praise. After all, the word “achievement” — if we dig deeper into our dictionary — is defined as something achieved “by means of skill and perseverance.”
A certain longevity and virility, a certain effort and stamina are implied, all of which lends to the concept of “success” an air of affirmation. We all value effort, after all. Effort is always in short supply and high demand. This appears to make success, as the fulfilment of an effort, a good thing.
But once we slip to the second definition,
“The gaining of fame or prosperity,”
we see how the high premium we placed on effort has now acquired something of the nature of the market. Effort, work, labor, is now commodified and cashed in: fame and prosperity have become our true pillars of success, and these are fundamentally economics-driven concepts. Fame is social capital; prosperity is plain old capital. In either case, it is the value placed on one’s efforts by others, that is, by the market of supply and demand, which ultimately defines what counts as success.
But how did we arrive at this market-based definition from our initial definition, which defined success simply as the attainment of “something desired, planned, or attempted?” It happened through the subtle, barely traceable assumption that to attain what you desired, planned, or attempted is always and necessarily an achievement — always a positive thing. Your “skill and perseverance,” the inherent value of your labor, made it so. There is no possibility here that achieving what you intended may actually be bad.
I am not for or against these definitions. I am not saying effort, skill, and perseverance are bad … but neither am I saying they are good. Like greatness, it depends on what they are applied to — one can be very skilled and perseverant with torture and sodomy. I am not even against a capitalist definition of success, as money and reputation, but nor am I in favor of it. What I am saying is that we are missing something more fundamental by using the word ‘success’ in the affirmative way that we do. And that missing foundation is found by returning, as usual, to the archaic and the original: success defined as nothing more than
“a result or an outcome.”
Plain. Simple. Most of all, accurate. This definition of success brings in no baggage, and no connotations of positive achievement or valiant effort or value added to the market. Results, outcomes, consequences, can be good or bad. Attaining them is not a good thing a priori — not until we have prejudged those consequences to be right and good in themselves.
This is why, as far back as the 1580s, such a phrase as “good success” was possible — implying, of course, that not all success was good. Today, “success” is good. Full stop.
And what have we lost by dropping the qualifier, and making success — the achievement of an outcome — an indiscriminate term of praise? Of course, we have lost any ability to distinguish between good and bad outcomes — good and bad goals. All we have is the pursuit of goals being a good thing, with no level at which to interrogate the goals themselves. To question “success” is, to modern ears, to be a madman.
And if we cannot distinguish between good and bad goals, good and bad outcomes, good and bad efforts and achievements, then what criteria do we have left to determine ‘success’? We have only a single authority to settle the difference: the naturalistic, Darwinian, market-based supply-demand law of the jungle that is capitalism. Or the philosophy of Genghis Khan. Might makes right. Power at all costs. This is another way of saying that without moralities, without some higher arbitration for good and evil, we will be dictated by whatever it is people want — which is a far nastier, brutish, and barbarian mode of being than what is right.
And this hefty consequence can be traced to the simple perversion of the concept of success: from the attainment of an outcome, a morally neutral thing, to the positive praise of attaining any outcome. After all, if all outcomes are equally good, if all efforts ought to be rewarded, then we inevitably fall back to the lowest common denominator of good: what is good for people’s pockets. This is why success has taken on the meaning that it has today — why the pursuit of outcomes has come to be associated with wealth and reputation, and nothing more.
All this comes from indiscriminately praising the most basic thing, the pursuit of outcomes, as somehow being good in itself. I could think of no more succinct definition of market-driven capitalism than the valorization of pursuing outcomes, pursuing capital, as something valuable for its own sake — as a cherished religious practice, even. And digging a bit into the history of the word, we find other thinkers — particularly the brilliant William James — noticing the same thing:
“The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.”
- William James to H.G. Wells, Sept. 11, 1906
This ‘moral flabbiness’ is the fact that success, in its modern connotations, has turned amorality into a moral achievement. It has taken something that is not yet good — the pursuit of goals — and made it good in itself, good for its own sake. This all-encompassing praise of pursuing outcomes puts everyone to work in a mindless way. Working for what, towards what, to what end? Who knows!
And yet this mindless state of work is a very happy condition for people who control the levers of the market. Because lacking any greater arbiter, any higher criteria for decision-making, everyone defaults to their basest instincts: the two animal desires to be admired by others and to own many possessions, desires which are very marketable, and very easy to manipulate by the monopolists.
There is room, there is plenty of room, for the base and the instinctual: I am not above admiration or money. But because they are base and instinctual, they don’t need any particular emphasis beyond what is already natural and innate — they certainly don’t require praise. It was considered an insult and a disgrace to one’s honor to be called ‘commercial’ in the past. Today, commerce defines our dictionary entry on success.
And while we go on to accumulate some measure of these things, riches and respect, to our personal satisfaction, do we not keep them in check by greater ambitions, greater definitions of achievement, things greater and more important than personal gratification or power? Or do we become converts of this modernist religion and raise up worldly success as the Most High? Is that all there is? Is this truly what is best in life? Is this what we call a ‘great’ success?
Let me present you with a competing definition of success, one that is starkly different from wealth, fame, or conquest. It is taken from an interview of Jocko Willink, commanding officer of SEAL Team 3 in the Battle of Ramadi, 2006. However critical you may be of the US invasion of Iraq (and you should be), it is not the political angle but the personal one that is being commented on here.
“For me, the part of the world that I’ve seen is a very dark place. It’s a dark place. That’s what war is. When your job, which my job was, was to expand that darkness in many ways … war is about killing people.
And so for me, when I look to someone who’s successful, it’s someone who brings some light into that darkness. So, for me, the first people that come to my head are Marc Lee, who is one of my guys, first CO killed in Iraq; Michael Monsoor, one of my guys, second Seal killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor; and Ryan Job, one of my guys, wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes.
Made it home, medically retired from the Navy, and married his high school sweetheart. Got her pregnant and finished his college degree. And after his 22nd surgery to repair the damage that was done to his head and face, there were complications and he died as well.
But all of those guys, in all of that darkness, they did things. They made a sacrifice that was completely selfless. And to do that and to live and fight and die … like a warrior, that to me is success. And those guys are my heroes.”
Both notions of success we have seen so far — Conan’s and Jocko’s — are warrior-based. The idea of achievement inherent to success, and the reason we do heap praise onto it, is because we know success, in whatever incarnation, takes effort and drive, which lends to a warrior ethos. Easy things are not a success. Success takes struggle, striving, and suffering. Yet despite these truisms, the two archetypal warriors we are given, the raging barbarian and the sacrificial soldier, are radically polar opposites.
One warrior kills, steals, and rapes. The other dies, loses everything, and loves. Both are achievements, in their own way, because neither comes easy. But which of them is good? Which of them is a ‘good’ success? The great man that has raped, pillaged, and conquered for his own glory, or the man, the little man, the anonymous man, unremembered by history, with no monuments to his name, who has tried, in his own limited way, as best as he could conceive it, to offer up his life to some greater good? It is not a definition of success written in the dictionary but one written in the heart.
To get ourselves out of these linguistic quibbles, out of the dictionary and into the real world, we need only approach the question in a different way. It is not success we are chasing, after all — that would be as empty as saying, ‘we are pursuing our goals.’ One might as well say water is wet.
Real life begins when we ask, ‘what are our goals?’ or even more to the point, ‘what should be our goals?’ What we are after, in the end, is an answer to the moral question, what is good? What goals are worth chasing? What sort of success qualifies as a ‘good success’ — or even a great one?
We cannot assume that what constitutes success is obvious. To do so is merely to sneak in your own definition and assume it for a universal one. Rather, we must seek out the truly universal definition, which is a much harder task than simply universalizing the one we happen to have. And a universal definition can only be discovered by first accepting all possible contenders. Nothing is off the table at this stage: we must introduce all possible definitions of good into the discourse, and through debate and dialogue, through logic and sense, let the strongest and most satisfying one emerge. You either debate and defend your view in the open arena or, if you are unwilling to do so, accept you are a dogmatist — these are the options.
And broadly speaking, there are two clusters of ideas contending for the definition of good. One holds the idea of good as worldly success. I use ‘success’ here in the modern sense: the pursuit of outcomes and consequences in this life, as an achievement and accomplishment in its own right. The key is that it is this life. Social recognition, money, power, luxury and leisure. It is within our own life that these outcomes and consequences, the fruits of our labor, ought to come to fruition and be experienced and enjoyed.
Other definitions of good hold to the idea of otherworldly success. ‘Good’ is a goal which exceeds the span of our own lifetimes. Good is an absolute or a transcendent category — not a worldly or a naturalistic one. In other words, it is not within our own lives that we find the most important outcomes of our lives.
After all, there are two kinds of consequences, two kinds of outcomes: those you will live through and those you won’t. Consequences are nothing more than the after-effects of your choices and the ripples of your actions through time. Not all those ripple effects will be limited to the span of your own lifetime. In fact, if we remember our great and monumental men, it is often the consequences beyond one’s lifetime that will have most effect on the rest of humanity. Effects cause more effects, and there is a ‘snowball effect’ as every action you take builds and accumulates the further it goes in time. And so, the greatest effects and consequences of your life are not even the ones you will ever experience.
If you want to define yourself by consequences, by outcomes, by the archaic sense of ‘success,’ then the widest and truest sense of success is one that utterly and completely exceeds the short span of your life. Simply imagine how far your actions will go into futurity and posterity. Envision how every branching choice you make leads to further branching choices both for your future self and for others around you and, when you expire, determines the choices that others will be left with. It is a vision so grand, so awe-inspiring, so humbling, so utterly dwarfing your short stint in existence, that it can demand nothing from you but commitment, careful discernment, love and hope, fear and trembling, and a grand sense of your destiny. Your very life turns out to be an act of service to this great procession which began before you and will end beyond you.
Alternatively, you may define success by those outcomes you will be able to enjoy. This is a much narrower range of the true consequences of your life. But even if you do choose to focus on this narrow band, the greater consequences of your actions and inactions will continue to exist beyond that range. They do not disappear or go away because you ignore them. You simply have chosen to invest more care and effort into the outcomes that give you pleasure, letting those other outcomes snowball to their own devices.
But what is the true measure of a man? Is it those outcomes he enjoyed or the real outcomes of his life, all considered?
Genghis Khan certainly did everything to make a name for himself, to accumulate fortune and fame, prizes and possessions, and to utterly dispossess thousands of people from those very things — for his own enjoyment. He had, within the span of his own life, what might be considered the best possible life. But what about what happened after his life? What about the lives he left behind, in his mad scramble for glory and riches? What about, say, Genghis Khan’s after life?
It may be that what happens after your life and what mystics and theologians have called your afterlife turn out to be intimately the same. Could it be that all the cultural traditions of the past — predating our religion of secularity and selfishness — correctly intuited something about the end of life, some premonition that we will experience what the effects of our life have been overall? Does a day of judgement await us in the end, when our consciousness reaches its ultimate climax and fulfillment in death? Is this why Near Death Experiences share this common thread of a great revelation about one’s own life, and why survivors of Near Death undergo a total metanoia, a transformational shift in their whole perspective and mindset?
Supernatural or not, the consequences of our lives extend far beyond us. And therefore, if we define success as the achievement of outcomes, it is entirely our own arbitration to limit those outcomes to a narrow few decades. But the truth isn’t limited to the limits we impose on it. If we have kids, and they have kids, and those kids have kids, then we are not so different from God in the sheer consequence of our creative acts and decisions. Whether or not we are a loving god or a tyrannical one remains to be seen. Our every action is a seed which will grow into healthy fruit or sickly fruit or not grow at all, leaving a hungry void and a starvation where there could have been plenty. The inconceivable ripple effects of the growth or the decay or the lost opportunities we leave behind are so great, it overwhelms the mind.
Best of all, to acknowledge the all-encompassing consequences of one’s life requires no psychological projection, no illusory imaginings, no fiction at all: it is the false limitation placed on those consequences, the blinding one’s self to their true scope, that is the real fiction. The consequences of our lives are real — more real than we can know.
I have been exploratory here, but I will end with a simple, down-to-earth statement of what I myself consider to be success:
To commit the short span of my life to the best possible outcome I can imagine for the whole of existence, the whole of humanity, and the whole of life on Earth, unto eternity.
Ambitious? Well, I am no Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great. Besides, what you measure as ‘ambitious’ will depend, always and ever, on your initial presuppositions about what is good to begin with. But an even shorter mission statement goes like this:
To do all the good I can do within my lifetime — nothing more and nothing less.
Remember: good is not a mere question of scope, of size, of quantity. If you think I must become a Napoleon to match my ambition, you would be mistaken — I think Napoleon had a very narrow understanding of what is good, a very unambitious one, which is what led him to inflate those scraps of good he did have to monomaniacal proportions. Entire crusades were started by a limited idea of good and were ended by a fuller one.
But the good is primarily a question of quality. It is a question of goodness, not necessarily — or exclusively — greatness.
I could amass a harem of a thousand whores and, while enjoyable, I would succeed only in wasting the lives of a thousand would-be mothers, depressing a thousand more of their fathers and mothers, and nipping a thousand would-be families in the bud. I could conquer vast territories of land but, leaving nothing but pillaged ruins and overtaxed towns and the tyranny of my reign, I could not even raise a single community in a way that beautifies it, grows healthy, and lasts into the generations. I could have a thousand bastard children who know me only as an absence, and who could go on to be driftless vagabonds or ruthless sociopaths all because of their lack of fatherly guidance.
Would these be good outcomes, a good success?
To ensure goodness, I say, set aside greatness for the time being. Start small. Do things well. And doing things well means doing them for their own sake — certainly not for your sake alone.
And so, it is not size, not greatness, not distance, but a constant attention to opportunity around us that defines the good, because opportunities for good are sprouting up everywhere. With attention and effort, bad things can be neutralized; neutral things can become better and improved; and improved things can become perfected indefinitely until they become the best things. Every area of life, without exception, is like this, from the cleanliness of a bathroom to the cleanliness of a conversation to the cleanliness of our minds. All around us, the world, the people, the environment are brimming with these seeds of potentiality that only await our cultivation to grow into perfection.
If you think these actions of improvement and cultivation and perfection are inconsequential, because they are local, you are still operating in the world of distances and quantities. You are still concerned with greatness, not goodness. But goodness, paradoxically, is more challenging: because it is closer. Greatness can be forestalled; goodness is right here, right now, before you, and consequently so is the failure to attain the good, right here, right now. The failure to pay attention. The failure to invest one’s energy towards positive rather than negative outcomes. The choice to harm rather than to help. The choice to give up rather than keep going.
Constantly and continually, we are working towards the good or working against it. We are bringing things to life or hurrying things towards their death. We are spreading more potential and more possibility, snowballing into better and greater things, or we are cutting away those possibilities by limiting them to some small, decrepit, forsaken corner of our minds.
This is success to me: to die knowing that every bit of me was dedicated and devoted towards the flourishing of the best vision of life I could possibly imagine for those around me and beyond me — to leave nothing undone which was within my grasp and my capabilities. Good things start, first of all, with the desire to do good. The more overwhelming that desire, the more opportunities we find to live it out in practice.
David Goggins defines success as follows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoju4Cy_C
No doubt, some of you will find my sense of success unsatisfying, if you are still recovering from the modern definition of success. You will want certainties and guarantees, like a calculation or a credit score: how can you predict what the outcome will be? But a genuine pursuit of the good leads naturally, intuitively, and practically to the best possible outcome, which I will sketch out for you below.
First of all, anyone in their right mind will identify that the greatest territory for bringing good to life is within the lives of their own children. Life leads to more life — this is what makes life utterly unique, its capacity for reproduction and continuity. And therefore, to maximize the positive consequences of your own life is always a choice to invest in the living, rather than in dead matter or in possessions. This is what Christianity means when it says that the world of sin, of greed, of false idols, is a dead world, and only a life lived in service and sacrifice is a living one. This is because service and sacrifice live forward, into the future, connecting one to the whole procession of human existence — not to the narrow splice of time that is now.
And so, if the best good I can achieve lies not in conquest but in creation — biological as well as spiritual creation— then the greatest good I described, so ambitious in scope, doesn’t seem so far from a family cottage home. A grand military empire would seem small-minded by comparison. It would be more ambitious, more militant, to raise a home of homeschooled children, capable of providing their own healthy unadulterated food, capable of working with their hands as well as with their minds, spiritually pure and uncorrupted by lies and bad actors, with a mind towards sacrifice and service.
And so, if I find a wife that was raised virtuously, and raise a family of children that are also virtuous, and dedicate all my effort and time towards providing them with a healthy and most importantly a moral life, then those kids will have kids also inspired by my example, and those kids will have further kids, too, and what started as a seed grows into a great tree with many branches, and all rooted in service, in good, in sacrifice to the world.
This would be an empire not of nations but of the soul, an imperium so grand and majestic it makes all the tin-soldier armies, all the slaughter, all the pride, seem rather petty and pointless by comparison. Generals can kill in droves, capitalists can amass mountains of dead matter, but only God and Nature can make life.
One becomes two, two becomes many, and I could never in my wildest dreams imagine all the good that will come — and the evil — from my actions and inactions, from my intentions and the purity or impurity of my heart. If I could predict those consequences, I probably fell short of my true capabilities.
This is the good, the good success, which resides in Nelson Henderson’s statement that “the true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”
This is what is best in life.
END.
