My wife and I were on a walk the other night and I smiled as I remembered something I had learned when I was at Trello. The exact details are lost to me, but the gist was that there was a feature that I thought should be added to Trello and I was lobbying our Head of Product to add it to the roadmap. My main argument? Another popular app had the feature, which was proof that customers found it valuable. If customers found the feature valuable, it made good business sense to add it. His response?
“How do we know that their customers find it valuable? How do we know?”
Huh. I hadn’t thought about that.
How often do we see “success” from the outside and automatically assume there’s success on the inside as well?
Business Success?
Start-ups can be famous for sustaining an image of success on the outside even if the fundamentals of the business are non-existent on the inside. This isn’t all start-ups, of course, but often the big failures have a penchant for making headlines.
Take WeWork. On the way up, they’re the model of success. If you were a competitor in the shared office space in 2018—like Industrious or Regus—would it have been possible to have even a single call with your investors without talking about WeWork? You would have gone insane. WeWork had ballooned to a $47 billion valuation and was preparing to IPO. It was only after their S-1 was published that someone decried that the emperor had no clothes. But up to that point? Success.
WeWork’s stock is down 85% on the year, valuing them at mere $430 million. The company is still burning hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter and at least one ratings firm believes there’s a real possibility it will default on its bonds.
Look, I’ve enjoyed my experience at WeWork, but are they successful?
Career Success?
How many actors would you say have been more successful than Harrison Ford? He’s Hans Solo from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, that guy from the Fugitive, and he’s still at it. Have you seen him in Shrinking on Apple TV+? The fifth Indiana Jones movie debuts in a few weeks.
I came across this article recently, Harrison Ford Has Stories to Tell, with this great subhead:
ENOUGH WITH THE LEGEND STUFF. IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE JOB AND WHAT REALLY MATTERS IN LIFE, HARRISON FORD IS UP FOR THAT.
I enjoyed the article. It’s long and winding, but I appreciate how from the very beginning, the writer incorporates a theme of trying to get meaningful material out of the actor. Yes, the article is about Harrison Ford, but it’s also about what it’s like to get a story about Harrison Ford. Yes, he’s had this amazing career, but who is he, really?
I’m going to spoil the article for you. After many anecdotes and interesting tidbits about Harrison Ford’s life, the author finally shares the material he’d been searching for:
He takes a long sip, tells me to take my time, make sure I have everything I need. I think back to what he said in the hangar the other day, about his life experiences informing his acting and the fact that so rarely has he played a dad. I take a drink and say:
“I want to ask you not about your children specifically but how becoming a parent changes a person. A smart friend of mine once told me something about being a parent, and I think about it a lot: I like to think I’d take a bullet for my wife, but there are two people I can tell you without a doubt I’d take a bullet for.”
He looks right at me, says, “Your children.”
“Yeah. Talk about learning about people, and humanity—you learn how to be afraid. My son’s chronic illness—I bring it to everything I write.”
“Well, how can you not? And I think you can bring it without talking about it. You bring it in another form. You bring it chemically. I mean the—[Table rubbing.] [Long pause.] [Long breath.]—I can tell you this: If I’d been less successful, I’d probably be a better parent.”
He stares at me for a long time.
He has given me material. He knows this—it’s what he’s been trying to do all along.
Choosing success
A lot is riding on how we define success in our lives. I can’t stop thinking about the line from the Harrison Ford interview, “If I’d been less successful, I’d probably be a better parent.” What did success mean to him when his star was rising? Could he have chosen to include “be a good parent” in his definition of success?
We don’t always have control over our successes and failures. The outward successes we see in others can be illusory. All we see is what’s on the surface. We don’t see how they’ve defined success, if their definition of success matches ours, or if they’re even living up to their own expectations. We have to choose our own definition for success.
I still have a lot of questions about my career. Yes of course I want to look back and see myself as having had a successful career, but the more I think about it, the more I want to make sure my definition of success is about more than just work. Success is also coaching baseball, finding time to go on retreat, and taking regular walks with my wife.
How do you define success?