How Can You Achieve Success and Happiness Together?

Note: This article is from blogger Evan Tarver, who explains that we can achieve happiness and success at the same time if we can balance them well.

When it comes to being happy, happiness is the ultimate driver of our lives and the overarching purpose of our actions. It’s a point of constant discussion in people’s minds. Leading thinkers believe that happiness equals success and that it’s up to the individual to define success, but defining success is just the beginning of our happiness problems.

Much of our collective existential concern stems from our inability to achieve our desired successes efficiently. We live in a new society. If we aren’t as successful now as we imagine ourselves becoming in the future, it causes a lot of stress. And if we’re worried about the future, that won’t do very well to make us happy.

The paradox goes even deeper. For success-minded people, there is rarely a level of success that’s fully satisfying. We, the success-minded, put a lot of goals that we are trying to achieve, and then when we achieve a goal, we don’t feel the happiness and satisfaction we’d hoped. Rather than being satisfied, we worry about the next step and start thinking about it without stopping to appreciate where we are.

Success might only equal success

If you want to be successful, you should surround yourself with people who are more successful than you and who motivate you more. Remember, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

But if pursuing success causes unrest and a lack of focus on the present, wouldn’t you surround yourself with equally unhappy people? What does success really mean? We spend a lot of time trying to define happiness, believing that we understand what it means to be successful. Well, sure, that’s because success is easy to comprehend.

It’s money or fame in a field. Those things are all great and definitely something we should strive for, but they aren’t what success is. They don’t define success. Instead, they’re the physical appearance of what it truly means to be successful, which is only the feeling.         

Success is a feeling. It’s not a car, a big bank account, or a lavish life. However, if you feel good while doing any of these things, I’d say you’re successful. 

There’s an underlying reason why you’re pursuing a physical representation of success. Sure, a sports car might make you feel successful, but let’s go deeper. What’s that feeling? Acceptance, maybe recognition by your peers, perhaps. The adrenaline rush from driving fast. The car is a trophy of success in modern society, but it doesn’t make someone successful. It’s the fulfilment of desire through the generation of an internal feeling.

Let’s see success from an altruistic perspective. Suppose you see that success is having the greatest influence on the people around you and that you feel great when you inspire many people positively and change their lives for the better.

Altruism doesn’t have to be on a massive scale. Perhaps you seek to affect the lives of others through one-on-one coaching. To you, success is helping people on a personal level, one by one. After doing a lot of coaching, you’re going to gain a little notoriety and start introducing coaching to more people until some of them are successful. Then, you have to feel very happy and good as well.

Happiness is your greatest accomplishment

If success is a feeling, and happiness is a feeling, it makes sense that success would equal happiness. But actually, happiness equals success and not the other way around. There is no transitive property here.

We spend our lives chasing goals only to find that the real goal, the reason for our existence as emotional beings, is happiness. We set lofty goals because there’s a void in our lives to be filled. We feel a lack of fulfilment when we aren’t striving to do great things, but in reality, that unfulfilled feeling is because we aren’t happy, not because we aren’t successful.

I believe that life, like anything in the world, is cyclical. Just because we feel unfulfilled doesn’t mean we don’t have happy moments. In fact, those happy moments are the key to success. All the moments that make you happy are what will make you successful, too.

Community is a big thing for me. Social interactions with interesting people fire me up. When I leave a conversation after a true connection, I can’t tell you how happy and alive I feel. The moment is fleeting, as all moments are, but really, I’m happiest when I’m sharing ideas with people.

However, in the traditional understanding of success, it comes in the form of entrepreneurship. I think that it’s possible to focus on my happiness in such a way that it increases my success. Since I love to connect with people, and I like to do entrepreneurship, to an extent, it is all about connecting and storytelling. I should be able to combine success and happiness; I should be able to achieve happiness as an entrepreneur.

My success at work is related to my happiness. In the end, I have to work in a place that makes me happy to be successful. It must be done through a company that promotes some sort of social benefit, or perhaps it must be done through work that specifically gives me an educational experience.

This is to be able to help other wonderful people in the areas they want.Here’s another proof: my other success goal is to become a published author. I will impress everyone with my achievements.

But, of course, it isn’t the act of being published itself that will make me happy and isn’t my motivating factor. Again, “Community is so important to me.

I enjoy sparking new ideas and having new ideas of my own sparked.” Connection is my motivation. So if I become a traditionally published author, I know I will be happy, not because people will think I’m successful or because I’ll become rich, but because many people will reach my message.

Regardless, the goal(s) that will make you successful must be driven by your happiness and not vice versa. But if you follow your happiness, success will follow. If you follow success first and don’t work to align your success with your happiness, you’ll end up less happy than before.

You can achieve both happiness and success

This means there’s hope. If happiness equals success, it means we can be both happy and successful. If, of course, we prioritise one over the other.

However, prioritising happiness over success doesn’t mean we should be any less motivated. We have only one life to live, and we sure as hell better maximise that time. I want to be an influential author or a well-known businessman.

I just know that becoming an author or businessman won’t make me happy on their own.  Instead, I view writing and entrepreneurship as vehicles that let me bring my happiness forward, meaning I have no choice but to become successful in both arenas. My happiness doesn’t depend on it, and we should work every day to be happy in our current life situation. Yet that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to expand the reach of our happiness through traditional success. This point is very true.

The bottom line is that there’s an underlying reason why you want the type of success you do. When you achieve that success, it isn’t the goal itself that makes you happy. It’s the fulfilment of your happiness through attaining the goal that does.

So it’s totally possible to become happy and successful. Just ensure that your definition of success aligns with your happiness.