Success: The Complete Redefinition of What It Actually Means

In 1970, a psychologist named George Vaillant took over a study that had been running for 32 years. The study had originally set out to identify the characteristics of successful men — and its early findings pointed to exactly what you'd expect: intelligence, physical health, social advantage, prestigious education.

But Vaillant kept tracking. Decade after decade. He watched the men who had all the "success markers" in youth stumble into depression, alcoholism, broken marriages, and quiet desperation by middle age. And he watched other men — some from the worst circumstances imaginable — build something rich, warm, and deeply satisfying by their sixties.

After 80 years of data, the study's conclusion was the same as Harvard's happiness research: the external markers of success — income, status, prestigious titles — predicted almost nothing about actual life satisfaction. The single strongest predictor of a successful life was the quality of relationships.

This is a blog about success. But first, we need to dismantle the version of success that most of us have been chasing — because it's a myth so pervasive and so profitable that billions of dollars depend on you never questioning it.

The Success Myth and Who Benefits From It

The dominant cultural narrative of success looks like this: a number in a bank account, a title on a business card, a follower count, an apartment that photographs well. It's measurable, comparable, and — crucially — never finished. There's always a higher salary, a bigger audience, a more prestigious position. This open-ended escalator is not a design flaw in the success narrative. It's the feature. An escalator with a top floor is a staircase with an endpoint. An escalator that never ends keeps you on it indefinitely.

The people who benefit from the endless escalator are the companies, institutions, and platforms whose revenue depends on your perpetual striving: luxury brands that sell status, social media platforms that monetise comparison, employers who extract maximum output from people chasing titles. This isn't a conspiracy — it's just incentive alignment. They profit most when you believe you're always slightly behind.

The question worth asking is: whose definition of success are you chasing? If you've never explicitly defined it for yourself, the answer is almost certainly someone else's.

What the Research Actually Shows

Strip away the cultural programming and the peer-reviewed data on success points in consistent directions:

Success and happiness diverge after a modest income threshold. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's famous study found that emotional wellbeing increases with income only up to around $75,000 per year (approximately ₹62 lakhs in today's terms) — beyond which additional income produces no significant increase in day-to-day happiness. A later 2021 study by Matthew Killingsworth revised this upward, suggesting wellbeing continues rising with income — but even Killingsworth's data shows diminishing returns so steep that the difference between ₹1 crore and ₹10 crores feels negligible compared to the difference between ₹3 lakhs and ₹10 lakhs. The hedonic treadmill is real: we adapt rapidly to new income levels, status upgrades, and material gains. The excitement fades; the baseline rises; the hunger restarts.

Autonomy predicts success satisfaction more than achievement level. Research across dozens of countries consistently shows that people who feel in control of their daily choices — regardless of their absolute income or status level — report higher life satisfaction than people who have achieved more but feel less autonomous. A modest business owner who sets his own hours often reports more life satisfaction than a high-earning corporate executive who can't say no. The number mattered less than the freedom.

The process matters as much as the destination. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's research on achievement showed that people who found meaning in the process of pursuing goals — the learning, the problem-solving, the daily craft — sustained higher motivation and reported higher satisfaction than those who were purely outcome-focused. The destination-only orientation creates a psychological trap: you feel nothing significant upon arriving because the feeling you anticipated was already consumed in the anticipation.

Redefining Success: The Four Dimensions

The most useful framework for success isn't a single metric — it's a four-quadrant map. True success lives at the intersection of all four; achieving one at the complete expense of the others is a form of failure dressed in achievement clothing.

1. Financial sufficiency — not wealth for its own sake, but enough to remove financial stress and provide meaningful choices. The gap between sufficiency and wealth is enormous, and most people are chasing wealth when sufficiency would give them everything that matters. Define your number honestly: what do you actually need to live well, fund your priorities, and stop worrying about money? That number is usually far lower than the one anxiety whispers.

2. Meaningful work — work connected to mastery, contribution, and some degree of autonomy. Not necessarily a "passion" (the passion myth is as dangerous as the wealth myth), but work that engages your capabilities, grows over time, and produces something useful. Sonam Wangchuk, whose story we told in our blog about focus, never had a prestigious title. He had meaningful work — and it powered four decades of extraordinary achievement.

3. Quality relationships — the variable that 80 years of Harvard data pointed to as the master predictor. Not the size of your network. The depth of your connections. One person who knows your full story and chooses you anyway is worth more than a thousand followers who know your highlight reel.

4. Physical and mental health — the platform everything else runs on. Every successful person who neglected their health to chase the other three eventually discovered that health is not a background variable. It's the foundation. Lose it, and the other three become hollow.

The People Who Got It Right

Steve Jobs had financial success, meaningful work, and legendary impact — and by multiple accounts, including his authorised biographer Walter Isaacson, died surrounded by the wreckage of relationships he'd sacrificed on the altar of achievement. His final words, reportedly, were about his sister, his children, the connections he'd neglected. The most technically successful man of his generation seems to have grasped the four-dimension model only at the end.

Warren Buffett, by contrast, has lived in the same modest house in Omaha since 1958. He makes his own breakfast, drives himself to work, and maintains decades-long friendships. He has said repeatedly that the best investment he ever made was choosing the right people to spend his life with. He has enormous wealth and chose sufficiency's lifestyle anyway — not because he couldn't afford more, but because more wouldn't add what the research said it would.

Neither man is a complete template. But together they illustrate the tension at the heart of success: you can achieve remarkable things and still miss the point, or you can build something quieter and fuller at the same time. The variable isn't talent or luck. It's definition.

How to Define Your Own Success

• Write your eulogy, then reverse-engineer it. This exercise — popularised by Stephen Covey and used by executive coaches worldwide — forces clarity: what do you want people to say about you at the end? Not about your title or your net worth, but about the kind of person you were and the impact you left. Now ask: are your current daily choices building toward that, or away from it?
• Audit your comparison anchors. Who are you measuring yourself against? If the answer is people on social media, you're comparing yourself to a curated fiction. Replace them with people you know personally and respect genuinely — people whose full lives you can see, including the trade-offs and the costs.
• Define your sufficiency number. Sit down and calculate what you actually need: housing, food, healthcare, education, meaningful experiences, savings buffer. The number is probably more achievable than your anxiety suggests — and achieving it buys something priceless: the freedom to choose what comes next.
• Protect one non-negotiable in each of the four quadrants. One financial habit (saving). One professional habit (learning). One relationship habit (showing up). One health habit (moving). These four anchors, maintained through all seasons, are the architecture of a life that looks like success from the inside.

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The Last Word on Success

The most dangerous form of failure isn't losing. It's winning at the wrong game — climbing the ladder only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall. Define the wall before you climb. And while you're climbing, remember that the view along the way counts just as much as the view from the top.

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• How to Start Over in Life: The Man Who Began at 65