Overfitting a definition of success

It often rubs me the wrong way that "success" seems to be generally defined by what people call "superficial" things, like money, fame, power, impact. 

It clearly rubs a lot of people the wrong way too, since these are in fact seen as "superficial" things by a lot of people. 

But I think it is not right disdain such things... money, fame, power, impact are all great if you're into that sort of thing. You might not be, but that is no reason to shit on other people's hobbies. I often think that there's a psychological component involved: since you can't have those things (well, you can, but you think you can't, or don't want to try) but deep down, kind of want them, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by devaluing those things in your mind. 
I guess more than anything, that comes from personal experience. :) So maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, I definitely think there is a much deeper, healthy viewpoint: Success is relative -- it is defined as optimality in pursuit of a goal. And that's the dictionary definition: "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose" per Google. And notice that no particular aim or purpose is specified. The aim, goal, purpose is personal -- it can be anything you want, and you can be successful at it. The goal can even to live in a jar as a way of living out your philosophy (see: Diogenes).

But there are multiple definitions. The next two are:

• the attainment of popularity or profit.
• a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity.

Words can mean different things, and that's great, but there's something... wrong about these latter two. We're in fact being tricked into valuing something because of some language shenanigans. Good feelings are associated with general success, as it should be. But then at some point, success became tied to prosperity, and now "good feelings" are tied to prosperity. Then prosperity becomes of the same ranking as success, despite our original definition of success as not being tied to any goal at all! 

In short, the value that we place in prosperity is undeserved, and only derived by proxy from the linguistic connection between "success" and "prosperity". Success is what we really wanted all along, because success is a more general concept. By definition, success is "greater than or equal to" prosperity. 

Not to shit on prosperity... to some extent, I think all humans want prosperity, we have to. And for some, prosperity IS the main or only goal in life, so equating prosperity and success doesn't really change their perspective/theory/philosophy in any way. 

But in general, people's goals are more complicated, and therefore life-success means something different from maximizing prosperity. Perhaps it's having a good relationship with family, friends. Maybe it's not. Perhaps it's knowledge, learning, self-improvement. Maybe it's not. Whatever it is, this dastardly equivalencing of success and prosperity on the linguistic level makes us forget that success is a much more general thing. It changes our goals, making us forget what we actually want, distancing us from our values. No wonder so many people have stupid regrets on their deathbeds like "I really wish I had spent more time with my friends and family".

At some level we all know this stuff. But we clearly don't act that way or really feel it... because we can't help but talk about success in those superficial terms, like "Wow! Look how rich this person is!" or "Wow! Look how beautiful and influential this person is!" and feel a tinge of jealousy or admiration. We always put rich/famous/powerful/influential people on a pedestal and say "Look! A successful person!" 

This is linguistic theft. You're stealing the word "success", robbing us of something to express the achievement of an arbitrary goal to mean the achievement of a very specific goal. If you've ever read the book 1984 or otherwise experienced this yourself (e.g. the cognitive frustration when you can't find that word, or the joy when you learn a cool new word that expresses exactly the subtle feeling you have) you know what happens when you steal words from people. You steal the ideas that the words represented as well, which has other meaningful repercussions. In this case, the idea of succeeding at life goals loses its expressibility (in the form of the word "success"), and so the idea fades, replaced by what success is now defined as -- succeeding at being rich/famous/powerful/influential. But more importantly, you also take the positive vibes associated with general success in life goals (whatever they may be) and assign it to succeeding at being rich, or whatever. For example, imagine how different our perspectives and our worlds would be if we regularly referred to people like Diogenes as "successes". 

Fundamentally, you can model this with some kind of associative information processing thing and explain it with some brain science, but there's no need: if we just paid attention we would notice this kind of abuse and its repercussions happening all the time. 

Remember this: Linguistic theft is idea theft, word murder is thought murder. Ideas orphaned from words die. (Kind of like orphaned memory blocks. Watch your pointers!) 

In the beginning we all wanted success in the general sense. The problem is that by some influence or another, our goals drifted further and further into "prosperity". If all of the goals are just "prosperity", then of course we will begin to identify success with prosperity and forget the deeper, more general notion of success. 

Another way to look at this: it's like overfitting. You know, when you're a kid when you think a word only applies to a really small thing but it's actually a much more general term (I guess this happens to adults too). Or like, giving a foreigner a tour of America but only taking them to places in NYC so now they think America is all Broadway, stocks, rude people, and good food? You can't really blame the kid or the foreigner for what they think! Yes, it is most often the case that truly successful people are rich, famous, powerful, influential. And it is always the case that these sorts of things really stand out to our lizard brains, because our brains are wired to crave such resources. Media and advertising knows this, and feed into it constantly with the messaging that success = prosperity. And that becomes the percieved truth. 

How do we counteract this? One way I've found is to always assume depth and complexity, from which naturally follows the admission of your own ignorance. In particular, whenever you catch yourself thinking a certain way, just go right ahead and rightly assume that what you're seeing is only a tip of the iceberg. You're seeing a manifestation of a much deeper system... so look deeper. If you can't look, just imagine it, or know it's there. You don't always get to see the whole iceberg right away and it's often easier and instinctive to make assumptions. But knowing that there's "something bigger out there" prevents you from thinking that the tip is the whole thing, so that if and when you do discover the other parts of the iceberg you can more readily understand the bigger picture. I think we should all adopt a mathematical mindset, like in that joke about the purported black sheep in Scotland: all you know is that there is a sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black. 

So next time you see "success" associated with "wealth, fame, power, influence" and catch your lizard brain salivating, think and ask yourself what success really means (hint: answer is above). Go beyond the superficial -- saying you want to be rich or famous can't be the whole story, right? There ought to be something much more fundamental. 

And more immediately, let's redefine our notion of success and stop referring to success as shorthand for "success at being rich and famous". Yes, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett are all successes, but not because they're wealthy or famous or powerful or influential, but simply because they literally attained a lot of goals, some of which were arguably quite difficult. Our current usage is an abuse of notation that is actual abuse, and we should stop.