Translator: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Imagine.
If you had a tiny magical tool that could guide you to your success,
would you take it?
Today, I want to gift you a story
about how an untranslatable ancient Greek word
is your compass to your success.
When I read the definition of success in the Oxford dictionary,
it said, "It is the attainment of money, fame or status."
I felt uneasy.
Is that it?
It could be more, right?
I always thought I was ambitious and driven,
but this definition left me feeling empty and disappointed.
How would I ever want something so egotistical?
In my corporate days, [success] meant career progression, bonuses, promotions,
sleep deprivation, stress and exhaustion.
Was this the cost of success?
I was trying to rationalise it, to understand it.
I was a business consultant
and in the name of efficiency, I was automating people's jobs.
In other words, I was getting rid of people.
Who was I to make such decisions?
I was trying to understand until a friend asked me a question.
"Are you proud of what you are doing?"
It was the most shameful moment in my career.
The truth I needed to admit echoed like a slap on my face.
I was not proud of what I was doing.
I was not proud of who I was becoming.
I was unfulfilled.
Can you relate?
So, what is success?
That question bothered me.
After countless hours on Google,
all that I could find
was videos, articles and blogs that alienated me even more.
See, success is a very confusing and frustrating term for me.
This is why I chose it as my topic today.
How could I attain it if I did not understand it?
Why was it so magnetic?
The second definition from the dictionary was equally puzzling and overwhelming.
It said, "Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose."
I was already sleep deprived, panicky and stressed.
I had no time to philosophise about my purpose in life.
All that I knew was that I wanted to make impact
and feel good about the work I did.
I had no energy to start afresh.
And so, I carried on for a year or so,
staggering through something I did not believe in.
Until I lost my grandmother.
She left this world, and I broke my promise to her.
I was going to be with her at the end of the year in Japan.
I did not even make it to her funeral.
On my honeymoon in Crete, I found time to grieve her departure.
The tears were for the time I was not going to get back -
for who I was becoming.
The realisation that the way I have structured my life
was costing me my relationships.
Was work more important than playing with my granny JanKenPon,
which is Rock-Paper-Scissors?
I knew I had to change something.
But what?
As you can imagine, my husband and I,
we did not have a very carefree honeymoon with all of this going on.
One of the days, we were at the spa,
and a book was accidentally left on one of the loungers.
It was Arianna Huffington's "Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success".
It did not give me a definition for success
nor a model that I could measure my life against,
but what it did give me was exactly what I needed at the time.
Hope.
A ray of light in my darkness and asphyxiation.
The possibility that it was OK to take care of myself and enjoy work.
And to do that I had to re-architect my life.
This book acted as an invitation for me to redefine success.
So here I am today to share with you an alternative model for success.
So, in my attempt to redefine success,
I broke this definition down into two questions.
Number one: What is your purpose?
And number two: Where are you on your journey to accomplishing it?
So here I am in Crete on a honeymoon,
and I for the first time realised that success is a two-step journey.
Purpose and journey.
So I shared that aha moment with my husband,
and he asked me those two questions back.
And he got silence.
You see, without the purpose, you cannot start the journey.
And then he said, "What more will another day at your current job give you?"
And he got tears of desperation.
At that point, I knew I had to resign.
And in lack of any other options, I decided to go home,
from the UK to Japan,
with no plan on what to do next with my life or career.
And so, I hurried to a destination called home.
Three months have passed, but triumph did not come.
Returning home did not equal finding my purpose.
I was annoyed.
In fact, I was angry and frustrated.
So purpose and journey clearly was not enough.
I was running out of time, excuses.
Pressure was high, but I still had no plan.
And have you heard of the phrase called,
"It's not about the destination; it's about the journey."
Reflecting back, I took a shortcut and flew to my destination,
but I did not go through the journey.
I cheated, and it did not work.
This time I was seriously lost.
I was homeless at home.
Something was distracting me,
and I was convinced I had demons in permanent residence in my head.
And then, I re-encountered Homer's epic "The Odyssey".
It took Odysseus ten years to return home after the end of the Trojan war.
Why?
Even Odysseus struggled with monsters on his homecoming journey to Ithaca.
So what happens when you are lost, and you cannot see your purpose?
Well, airplanes have GPS radars,
but how do we humans know whether we are on the right track?
Values are the compass to our success -
the important life philosophies that make us who we are.
Honouring our values allows us to align with our true north, our purpose.
And as we don't have the physical compass or constellations
to guide us on the right path,
we humans are designed to know whether we are on the right track
in one and only way.
We are equipped with feelings and emotions.
Our heart, more than our intellect,
knows and signals whether we are on the right track.
So how did Odysseus feel in order to reach Ithaka?
Hm, feeling.
I was looking for a feeling until it landed on me.
A feeling that changed my life.
The feeling that unlocked what success meant for me.
The untranslatable ancient Greek word
that is perhaps older than democracy itself:
Eudaimonia.
I was right in there, in that black hole, after quitting my job
and embarking on an unsupervised purpose-seeking journey
to redefine success.
I had to fight with my worst demons.
Anger, loneliness and shame.
Why me? What was wrong with me? Why I couldn't figure it out?
And amongst all this, I discovered a sense of wild inner joy
despite external adversity.
My zen despite the chaos.
My compass to success.
Eudaimonia doesn't have a perfect translation,
and it is often confused with happiness.
Aristotle thought that the constant expectation of happiness is unreasonable.
Eudaimonia means "keeping in good terms with our demons, our spirits".
Like Yin and Yang in oriental philosophy, our light is balanced by our dark side.
To paraphrase Aristotle,
human success is to flourish by actively behaving with virtue.
In other words, our values.
So now I knew that success has three instead of two steps.
Purpose, journey and values.
Job done, right?
Uh-uh.
Back into the UK, I started my business.
My purpose is to democratise human flourishing.
In the last four years, I had the honour to spend time with hundreds of people
who entrusted me on their purpose-seeking journey.
I heard their stories first hand, and there was a meaningful pattern.
This gives me the courage to stand in front of you today
and share what I now call "The Eudaimonia Success Model".
It has three elements:
value, belonging and respect.
Looking back, my dots eventually connected.
I was a business consultant getting rid of people,
fixing my bad karma by helping people with their CVs.
After completing my coaching course,
I was getting challenged out of my depth
with clients who wanted to find their purpose,
when I didn't have my mess sorted out yet.
Ironic, right?
My work had meaning and impact by helping people decode their purpose.
Number two.
When I set up my business, I was attracting the wrong collaborators.
Why?
I had compromised my values.
Now, trust, integrity and respect are my unmistaken compass.
Honouring my values allows me
to connect with a community of people that inspire me and challenge me.
They are my chosen home; I feel I belong.
Next, something totally unexpected happened.
The more I focused on fulfilling my purpose,
the more my wisdom was getting sought
by people to influence their decisions in their lives.
So, when I was about to debunk the traditional metrics of success -
money, fame and status -
I noticed that they sounded like the dark side of success.
So, in true Eudaimonia fashion, let's dance with these demons for a moment.
Money is self-explanatory.
Fame is our popularity or reputation.
Status is the rank, position one has in an organisation or community.
The higher the status, the more decision-making power they have,
and this is normally associated with our leaders.
So, putting both models side by side,
to my surprise, they were the two sides of the same coin.
When we know our purpose, we can add value.
The higher the value, the bigger the reward.
And we can measure value
by the number of people who benefit through our work.
And money just helps us put worth to the impact we make.
And knowing who we are for others creates belonging in the community we serve.
We can measure belonging by tapping into our sense of feeling at home.
The clearer the purpose,
the more others recognise us and gravitate towards us.
The third one - honouring our values - allows us to make integral decisions.
Others respect us,
and this is the art, basically, of influencing.
So as you can see, both models are on the same continuum,
for the three metrics of wealth, recognition and influence.
They are simply described from a different point of view.
Now, if you have to keep something,
then think of Eudaimonia as the cause of success,
and the traditional model as the effect of it.
And if we focus just on the effect, and we forget the cause of success,
then we end up alienating ourselves,
and this is exactly what happened to me early on in my career.
Finally, Viktor Frankl’s words made sense.
"Success cannot be pursued, it must ensue."
Like Odysseus,
it took me ten years to understand that my past career made sense.
My long journey did not go to waste.
These ten years were now a gift.
Today, on my birthday, I return to Crete where it all started with a book.
My intention was to share with you
an alternative and hopefully more meaningful perspective to success.
Whatever success means for you,
you know it will mean a sure dance with your demons.
Now you know how an untranslatable ancient Greek word
is the compass to your success.
I wish you your journey to success is a long one -
full of Eudaimonia.
(Applause) (Cheers)