Western culture embraces the notion that success is synonymous with having more money than you could ever spend or being nationally-recognized as the best at something. In sports, we find a measure of joy and satisfaction when our favorite sports squadron wins a national title. As fans, we find ourselves enjoying that success by proxy.
“My team won the [insert national title competition here],” we might say at the office water cooler.
Unless you’re Ryan Smith, they’re probably not your team.
Still, there’s an interesting thing that happens when you root for a particular team and they do well. Their success — even though your fandom contributes almost nothing to it — can have an immediate effect on the self-esteem and confidence of the fan. This is a phenomenon known as Basking in Reflected Glory or BIRGing. BIRGing hits the brain in some of the same way as personal achievement does.
We all know someone — maybe it’s ourselves — who seems to live by basking in their own former glory. The cliché version is the high school football star, now in his late 40s, who can’t seem to move beyond those glory days of being able to “throw a pig skin a quarter mile.” (Thank you Uncle Rico.)
Napoleon Dynamite and national pride aside, we don’t have to throw a football the way Tommy Frazier does in order to enjoy real success. Society tells us so measure success on a very large scale which can discourage us as we pursue “small” things in life. Using a national title scale to measure our success in losing those pesky fifteen pounds is a bit like measuring a high jumper’s record-breaking jump against the distance to the moon.
Where personal successes are concerned, there is only one metric that’s worthwhile: measuring where we are now against where we were.
Nir Eyal is an expert in the field of behavioral design and consumer psychology. I don’t know Nir personally, but it appears he’s one of the good guys in behavioral design, not one of those who is trying to keep you glued to your phone all day, every day.
In a recent article titled “Why Successful People Only Get More Successful,” Nir makes two powerful arguments to support the idea that our personal success should only be measured against ourselves. First, he says, “throughout our lives, we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves in specific ways; then, we tend to stick with those labels and their accompanying behaviors. Yet expectations form our reality, so we should take care not to label ourselves in ways that limit us.”
Using the moon-shot measuring stick again, we have to remove the success stifling stigma that because we’ve failed before, we will always continue to fail. It’s true that failure is part of success, but it’s not so binary as we either succeed or we fail. Incremental gains and incremental setbacks are the hallmarks of any journey toward achieving something — big or small.
Let’s use perhaps a silly example to illustrate. It’s Saturday morning and I haven’t done any laundry in six days for my six-person household. All the laundry baskets are overflowing.
After a brisk run, I start the laundry. Six loads later, my bed is covered with neatly-folded, clean clothes. However, there’s still a load in the dryer and one waiting to be washed. But, the day is gone, and it’s time to get kids to bed.
I can label myself a failure because there were two loads of laundry yet to be handled or I can view what I did with a sense of accomplishment. Three-fourths of the way there is great progress, and not much additional time will be required to wrap up the task.
Our attitude toward success and failure carries outsize importance in our progress toward future successes (or failures, though I wouldn’t label progress toward failure as progress).
This brings us to Nir’s second important point. In order to build new beliefs, we have to challenge our old ones.
Identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that undermine your confidence and expectations of success. Replace these beliefs with more realistic perspectives. Reflect on and celebrate your strengths, talents, and past successes. Remind yourself of your capabilities and resilience in overcoming challenges. — Nir Eyal
We can find growth and fulfillment in our own successes simply by reshaping how we view them. Instead of chasing arbitrary benchmarks that have little intrinsic meaning, we should focus on our own progress and incremental achievements.
In normal, everyday living, success has nothing to do with grand accolades or validation from others. Success is about becoming the best version of ourselves, one small victory at a time.
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