What we want more than anything isn’t success, it’s significance. Because you can have it all and still have nothing.
It’s a theme throughout literature, a constant depth-point artists love to probe.
As a quick for-instance, one of my favorite novels, Jude the Obscure, written by Thomas Hardy in 1895, is about a young, idealistic man ablaze with ambition. His mentor, the schoolmaster, moves away to Christminster, the hub of divinity and intellectualism, and Jude vows to join him one day.
But he falls into the temptation of an alluring girl who fakes pregnancy so he will marry her. The marriage fizzles but not before she sucks his soul dry, his dreams of significance replaced by the simple desire for success in this hard world.
He eventually makes it to Christminster and runs into his old professor, only to find him a shell of the man he once was.
The book is a complex masterpiece, but it communicates this one simple idea very well. Jude, like many of us, set out for significance, but in the end would have just been content with simple success.
And yet maybe he was better off without success too. At least he knew where he stood.
Without significance, you have nothing. Success just complicates things.
John Maxwell recently recorded a podcast with Shane Parrish on the Knowledge Project, and at seventy-two years old, he reflected on his life and work with great clarity and honesty.
He hammered this point home because he has lived it.
He said, “Success is indeed a journey, but if you stop at adding value to yourself, you miss the reward of significance.”
At forty years old his life changed when he realized he had been leading the wrong way: he had been gathering a following when he should have been creating other leaders.
His own success was empty, but investing in the success of others was rich and fulfilling.
Which reminded me of a quote I read somewhere that the man who shares the secret sauce will be more successful than the one who hides it and uses it for his own gain.
Now for sure Maxwell will sell you a bucket of books teaching you about significance and happiness and the steps and processes to achieve both, but I think we may can sum it up here, if I may don the chef’s hat and speak openly about the secret sauce.
The secret sauce is forgiveness. Since significance only happens in the context of real human connection, and since humans are broken and sensitive, the only way we can connect is by a shared commitment to love one another and forgive one another.
It’s our natural habitat to put others down in favor of ourselves, to pursue our success outside the flourishing of our community, but we are incentivized to cut that out. Significance demands it.
And if I may don the artist’s beret and go a bit deeper, I think what we will find is that what really anchors the whole thing, the staple to the secret sauce, is humility, without which it is impossible to forgive.
You can’t forgive someone you feel superior to. I read that recently.
The ideal, the absolute goal and high water mark is significance, but if all you can do is be successful, then that’s okay too. Just don’t expect to be overly happy about it.