What Does "Success" Really Look Like?
Well hello there! Welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege. Pull up a chair, I’ll put something on the grill for you. Drinks are in the cooler too, grab whatever you like. I’m Alan Henry, and I’ll be at the grill for this particular cookout. Hit me with your special requests, I can accommodate. So, did you enjoy your labor day? I hope you got a chance to relax, reflect, and consider seizing the means of production and unionizing your workplace! Yeah? Wonderful, let’s get started.
This week let’s talk about what success looks like to you.
I’m partially inspired by this tweet, but also by a few interactions I’ve had recently with people asking me what my “secret to success” actually is. The fact that people even ask me, of all people, that question, is utterly laughable to me, but I do have to recognize on some level that I’ve done some things that a lot of people want to do, so maybe I do have some advice to offer. But it’s not the kind of advice you might think I would offer.
First of all, a lot of what I consider good advice that’s helped me advance in my career to the point where I have is, predictably, in my book, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. So if you haven’t picked it up yet, please do! If you prefer audiobooks, the narrator we chose for my book, Landon Woodson, has a velvety smooth voice, let me tell you.
But more precisely, the thing I want to remind people is that before you go looking for “tips” or “secrets” to success, you need to define what success looks like to you. So much productivity advice or habits of successful people are almost impossible to truly emulate, and are usually so out of touch for normal people as to be completely useless at best and actively unhelpful at worst.
Stripped of their context—and more importantly, stripped of the privilege that already wealthy and powerful people have—things like “get up every day at 4am” and “decline all meetings unless you have something to say,” or “grab a workout in the middle of the day” aren’t just unreasonable for most people, they run the risk of being outright insulting. And that’s also the kind of mindset I wanted to push back against in the book. Productivity tips written by or sourced from privileged people are aspirational, yes, but largely useless if you’re not already in their shoes.
One of the stories that I mentioned in my book was the fact that one of my colleagues very proudly had a “no meeting day” every week, where he blocked off his whole calendar for work. That was absolutely his prerogative, but I noticed that the rules were different for me when I tried to do the same thing. What was a quirky and fun way to manage time and be productive when he did it became problematic and troublesome when I did it, complete with people booking over me regardless of what my calendar said, and getting obtusely defensive when I explained that I was going to decline because my day was booked—the implication being that somehow my time was their time, no questions asked, and that by protecting my time and boundaries I was being difficult to work with.
That illustrates a lot of the “just work smarter and you’ll get promoted” advice from a lot of career experts and already-successful folks who don’t remember what it’s like to have to struggle to get through a shift, or worse, what it’s like to work a job that didn’t really value you in any significant way. Sometimes you have to do good work in spite of your job or manager in order to succeed, not thanks to them. So my advice is simple: when you see good productivity advice, take what you think will work in your favor and in your specific situation, and then discard the rest.
Don’t bother with breathless PR drivel from CEOs and billionaires looking to launder their reputations and their corporate misdeeds through lifestyle and career media by offering you “helpful tips” to work like a CEO when the only reason they’re a CEO is that they’ve failed upwards from previous positions, know someone willing to “give them a shot” at running a company, or who got appointed to a new company after leaving a trail of horror in their previous position that left people jobless and burned out but made a few select investors happy. Trust me, there’s nothing you, in your everyday life, have to learn from someone like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, or Mark Zuckerberg.
As much as those people are “successful,” they live lives so far apart from the people they manage that their advice to be like them is so far-fetched as to be inapplicable. Considering the majority of them wound up with their roles in ways where the ladder has been summarily pulled up since they ascended, it’s not even worth it to look. Sure, they’ll tell you to look out for your personal health, but they’ll never allow their employees the kind of work/life balance in order to do so, so why should you think they would look to you as anything but a problem if you did?
So instead, look to the people who actually inspire you and study how they work and live. People in your life, or only a few degrees separated from you. Instead of a CEO, consider someone who’s in a role that you’d like to have in a few months or years. Or look at someone you know who manages their life well, from what you can tell: someone who seems to have a good relationship with their family or friends but also manages to balance their jobs and hobbies well. Talk to them about when they get up in the morning, or what their evening relaxation routine looks like.
If you have a hobby you want to get better at, talk to the people you look up to in that field for their advice. For example, I really want to get back into streaming on my Twitch channel, but I struggle with things like setting a stream schedule, or deciding what to play. So instead of looking at what the top three streamers on Twitch do every day, I look at what the streamers I actually enjoy watching do, and ask for their advice instead.
That’s what I mean about critically thinking about what “success” means to you, instead of blindly taking the social programming we’re fed that “success” equals rich, stereotypically attractive, white, privileged, and living a high-end lifestyle. Maybe that is what success looks like to you, but at least think about it before you take what’s been spoon-fed to you.
In my case, success simply means being able to pay my bills without worry, saving for my future, having enough time and money to indulge in my hobbies from time to time, and having the time to take care of my health and well-being. “Success,” to me, doesn’t mean being a billionaire, it just means being able to know the rent is paid without thinking twice about it and knowing I can freely support my friends and other creators I love so they can continue to do the things that bring me joy. You’ll notice none of those things come with a title or a dollar amount attached. But that’s just me, and I’m not a saint here. I’m just as selfish as anyone else and like to spend money and time on things that make me happy.
You should do the same—just spend a little time thinking about what it would take to actually, truly make you happy first. Maybe it’s having enough income to spend more time with family, or to be in a job or a location where you know you’ll have medical care, or a way to save for your future. Maybe success to you is knowing that you can take a vacation whenever you want to, or success means you have a path towards seniority and renown in your field. Whatever it looks like, make sure it’s an equation that’s tuned to your conditions, not someone else’s.
I’ll see you back here in two.
[ Worth Reading ]
What Serena Williams Gave the World, by Sean Gregory: This is a brilliant profile of Serena Williams on the heels of her retirement, which I sincerely hope will be long and fulfilling and restful in exactly the way she wants it to be. She’s given us so much of herself over the years of her career that it’s only fair to spend a little time reading about where she came from and what her life has been like and, hopefully, what it will be like in the future.
The Humiliating History of the TSA, by Darryl Campbell: I’m willing to bet that you’ve read this already, but if you haven’t, I’ll say that it’s probably one of the first pieces in a long time that actually made me stop what I was doing and read the entire article from start to finish. The feature—which has a killer lede and a ton of amazing sources all through the piece—is an amazing walkthrough of the jingoism of the moments post 9/11 that established the TSA, and the suffering that both we, the traveling public as well as the people who work for the TSA, have to put up with on a regular basis.
I’m a Local News Reporter. To Save Local News, We Must Publicly Fund It, by Guthrie Scrimgeour: I’m no big Jacobin fan in general, but I’ve been thinking about what it would look like for journalism in America to shift towards a more general community-supported and worker-owned model. Something that takes some of the lessons from publicly funded media outlets that are, ideally, accountable to the public the way the BBC and CBC are supposed to be through TV licensing and government funding, but also allows them to be decentralized and produce amazing journalism, much like the way PBS is organized. I don’t know if it’s something we can actually make happen, but it’s a lovely dream, and this piece is very thoughtful in that regard.
[ See You, Space Cowboy ]
I recommended a PBS series a few newsletters ago, but this time I’m going to recommend a PBS YouTube channel: PBS Terra. I very specifically love two shows on the channel, Why Am I Like This and Far Out.
Of course, Far Out also happens to star WIRED contributor and personal friend Swapna Krishna, who is just as incredible in her role hosting the show as she is an amazing journalist. The most recent episode of Far Out highlights the human body’s recently-discovered cannabinoid system, and what that actually means for research into therapeutic uses of marijuana that were long suppressed by the “war on drugs.” It’s an incredible watch on its own, and it’s only about 11 minutes.
Similarly, Why Am I Like This did an amazing episode recently on how looks aren’t enough to determine paternity, using a hilarious “that baby isn’t dark enough to be mine” joke as the initial prop for a hilarious take on a noir-style detective story. If that seems like there’s no way that could actually work, just….watch the episode yourself and come along for the ride.