CAUSES OF SUCCESS

1 Causes of success and failure

Disdain to cash in a small share of your pride to buy a slight success, and you may find that you have to spend all of it just to hold on to life. Refuse to accommodate the world, and you’ll end up homeless.

The prosperous smoke out the needy, and coax them to give up their time and independence to purchase a slender share in their own ruthless scams. And then they make them feel grateful for the service that they do them. And they are adept at promising in such a way as to oblige you to pay.

Some ambitious schemers, like Mussolini, have marched to office by appearing irresistible. And some creep to it by appearing innocuous.

Shrewd people know how to parlay their endorsement by a few so as to win the plaudits of many. They convert the respect which no one quite feels for them to a firm position of vantage. And then they use this position to extort the regard of yet more.

I sweat to earn the good opinion of those whom I don’t respect, so that I can then trade it to buy the good opinion of those whom I do respect.

If integrity guarantees success, then those who do not succeed must have no integrity.

2 Success through illusion

If you hope to get on in the world, you must learn to lie. And if you want to find the truth, you first have to fail. But the one truth that none of us can bear to face is that we have failed. Succeed, and people will flock to you, while truth, which hates crowds, will forsake you. If you want people to leave you alone, be a failure.

Our delusions serve our real self-interest, and our self-interest works to prop up our delusions.

We make our way in the world by telling ourselves agreeable lies and then cajoling others to share them. You gain a fortune, not by generating the most value, but by inflating the price of what you sell and then persuading a throng of buyers to pay it.

We couldn’t achieve half our real success, if we dropped our self-deceptions.

Since we are all impostors, we all need to pretend to be taken in.

The sole truth that we put any trust in is success. So why should we care how false we have to be to get hold of it? And we are ready to believe in any lie that helps us to it.

In order to function soberly in the world, you need to stay drunk on the cheap liquor of hopeful self-belief.

If you don’t have the brains to deceive yourself, you are not cut out to find real success in this world.

3 Small winners

I feel sure that I am more than the big triumphs that I have gained, and that my rivals are less than the small ones that they have gained.

Those who have got small things done by dint of their small talents are in no doubt that great things get done by the application of the same talents on a slightly larger scale. An efficient manager assumes that a great statesman is no more than an efficient manager who has won promotion to a higher office.

However low our success, most of the time it tops our abilities.

We strain to swipe those prizes that are high enough to seem worth attaining but low enough for us to reach them.

We all now use up our lives auditioning for a cheap success, so that we can boast of it to people who are so deafened by their own self-applause that they can’t hear ours.

A low success now comes so ready to our hands, that we don’t aspire to anything more glorious than a well-paid ordinariness.

ILLUSORY SUCCESS

4 Paradise of fools

This world is a paradise for fools. They know how to make the most of its fatuous amusements and how best to cope with its idiotic vicissitudes. And though they may make no better job of it than the wise, at least they’re more pleased with their work.

A fool is far more sharp-witted than a sage, and is more fit to profit from the world’s foolishness.

Life sets problems so complicated that you have to be a fool to solve them.

In this world it pays to be a fool, so long as you don’t know what you are. And who would be fool enough to do that? The only kind of fools that the world has no use for are those who are foolish enough to know their own soul.

We are all fools, but some of us are shrewd enough to know how to exploit the foolishness of others to serve our own turn. And that might make us the biggest fools of all.

5 Wiser than the wise

Fools have the whole world on their side. The wise have only their own wisdom to back them, and that whispers to them what fools they are.

How could fools not scorn the wise, when they see them wasting their time on things that don’t pay?

Fools are wiser than wise people, since they never need to feel the distress of finding out that they are fools.

The world, like the Lord, makes use of fools to confound the wise.

You’re lucky if the best service your brains do you isn’t to make an ass of you.

6 Second-rate success

The mediocre and conniving have the best of it in this world of conniving mediocrity. We rise by being ruthlessly second-rate. Our mediocrity wins us success, and success proves to us that we are not mediocre. The world, like a magnifying glass, makes small talents look large, but turns big ones to a blur. In this world it’s dogged plodding that does it.

If people’s vanity fails to save them from seeing how mediocre they are, their mediocrity will do it.

They thrive most splendidly, whose superficiality squares with the world’s. Their shallow gifts are best matched to serve the world’s shallow needs. And their efficient brutality is best able to master its brute indifference.

Great careers are those that end in catastrophe. Middling talents go from strength to strength.

7 A little knowledge

Most of us trot on so well with the world, because we have no untoward thoughts about it. The fewer ideas you have, the better you get on in life. And the more stolid our intellect, the more secure our seat in the world. Lack of imagination is the key to success in any profession. Think beyond it, and you won’t make much headway within it.

In order to make your way in this flat world, you have to keep to flat ideas. And most of us are ready to do that.

It doesn’t take much intelligence to make a big success. Seeing this is so, intelligent people scorn success, and successful people scorn intelligence. Which is more of a surprise, that empty-headed people can be so competent, or that competent people are so empty-headed?

It is the nescient and narrow-minded who know how to get things done in this world. So is it any wonder that most of what gets done is so bone-headed?

A little knowledge will suffice to speed you safely through the big world. Most people are quick to learn how little they need to know in order to get on, and they are determined to learn not one whit more than that.

Lies are the sole solid foundation on which you can build a real and lasting success.

Is it a great wonder that those whose sole thought is for their own advancement should advance so far in the world? They are just shrewd enough to spot the main chance, and plenty ruthless enough to let nothing stand in their way as they go for it.

8 Confidence feeds competence

In this world of solemn quackery confidence does more than competence. The false self-belief that we derive from our small victories gives us the real self-assurance that we need to win more considerable ones. ‘As is our confidence,’ says Hazlitt, ‘so is our capacity.’ Conceit lends you confidence, and confidence will render you capable and bold. ‘Consciousness of our powers,’ as Vauvenargues wrote, ‘augments them.’

To make your way in the world, you have to act like you are already a success. But to make a work that might last, you have to learn to be a failure. To get things done, you need confidence. But to find out the truth, you need doubt and diffidence.

Some people prove how competent they are by getting themselves promoted to a position far above their competence. And then their new status makes them able to do the job by putting competent people at their service.

It is the office, and not the holder, that is competent. Where it is the reverse, the system will soon break down.

The emptier you are, the more you can inflate yourself. And you will be so elastic, that you won’t feel the weight of the world pressing on you.

Incapacity is as much the effect of failure as its cause.

9 Confidence man

You gain confidence in your own powers when others show that they have confidence in you. And they have confidence in you in so far as you have confidence in yourself. They are convinced by the faith that you show in yourself, and you in turn are convinced by the faith that they show in you. The world takes you for what you think you are, and you come to be what the world takes you for. ‘Nobody,’ as Trollope wrote, ‘holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.’ The dodge goes round and round and has no stop. ‘Life,’ as Pascal said, ‘is a perpetual illusion.’

Those who are most full of themselves seem most substantial to others. Most of us are willing to take others at the high valuation that they place on their own merits, since we do the same with ourselves and we expect them to do so too.

The medals go to those who don’t doubt that they deserve them. We don’t think much of those who lack the presumption to press their own claims.

In order to get on, you have to set too high a price on your own merits, till the rest of the world finds that it suits it to share your inflated self-opinion.

10 Overestimate yourself

Fortune favours the self-infatuated. How else could the human race have conquered the globe?

The least drop of self-doubt is fatal in this world of sincere self-promotion.

In order to do great things, you need to make too much of your talent. And in order to stay content with doing small ones, you need to make too much of their value. ‘To measure up to all that is demanded of him,’ Goethe wrote, ‘a man must rate his gifts too highly.’

I overrate my aims more than my ability to achieve them. My conceit keeps me small by assuring me how large my goals are. And it forgives all my faults, since they were serving such vast designs.

All the petty toils that I have to go through to do a thing leave me in no doubt that it must be worth doing. I know that my object is worth attaining, since I have had to smash through such stubborn barriers to reach it.

If people do a thing with ease, they impute it to their virtuosity. And if they find it hard, they impute it to the greatness of their goals.

EFFECTS OF SUCCESS

11 Winner takes all

Winners can afford to judge their worth much higher than it is, and losers can’t afford not to.

Success may be a flatterer, but failure is no friend.

All the world declares that it is better to deserve success than to attain it. And all the world acts as if the opposite were the case. And yet those who win no garlands feel all the more certain that they are due them.

12 To gain is to deserve

Most of us are sure that we prove that we merit a thing by the bare fact that we have got it. Some conceited people so overprice their success, that they may demur that it’s more than they deserve. Yet they are so conceited, that they will soon deem that they have earned much more, and feel resentful that they have met with so little.

When I triumph, I deduce that I am not the impostor that defeat had tempted me to suspect I might be. Success convinces us that we are genuine, and our rebuffs hiss that those who have trounced us must be fakes.

When we fail, we fear that the world’s judgment might be right. But it’s not till we succeed that we feel sure that it is.

People now know that they are such big winners, that they feel that winning must be the best gauge of merit, and that failure is the one indubitable refutation.

Our greed craves more than we get. And our pride tells us that we deserve all that we have got. And our smugness assures us that all we have was worth the getting.

What I get is a measure of what I deserve. So how could I rate its value too high?

13 We learn the wrong lessons from success and failure

When I fare well, I conclude that I have too much flair to fail. And when I fail, I conclude that I have too much decency to do the shifty things I would need to climb. If I prevail, I take it that the world dares not gainsay my conspicuous merit. And if I’m vanquished, I take it that the world is too dull to grasp it. I reckon that success is a post for which I am over-qualified.

I learn from my own adversity and from my neighbour’s prosperity, as both taste so bitter to me.

We learn from our stumblings, though in most cases the wrong lessons.

Winning hardens us, defeat corrodes us. Good fortune tempts us to dispense with our safe virtues, and mischance makes us too poor to use them. You must choose either the victor’s self-satisfaction or the loser’s self-pity. But many of us plump for the victor’s self-pity.

Which galls a failure more? The indignation that they don’t deserve to fail or the disabling anxiety that they do? Some people are unsure if the world will now pay them the rewards that they are due. But they still have no doubt that they are due them.

Some people lose their heads because they are maddened by their bad luck, and some because they are flushed by their success.

14 Prudence and wisdom

We are content to be served by reason, but not to be ruled by it. And we consent to be guided by cunning, but not to be governed by wisdom. Careful prudence grunts and sweats as the lackey of our crazy compulsions.

Success makes some people seem sage, and some not need to. And failure makes some too poor to be wise, and others too poor to seem much else. It robs them of what is not worth risking, and so may shrink them to a seeming sagacity. Those who have failed to get anything else may thus appear to have got wisdom. The smug and prosperous love to praise the luckless for their sage and unavailing dignity.

We may feel awe at those who have the sagacity and self-sufficiency not to care for the world. But there is more than a drop of scorn mixed in with our awe. I too might pay it no mind, and might cast it aside, if it didn’t need me so much. Don’t we all assume that we could get on quite well without the world, if only it could get on without us?

When they meet with a shock, prudent people use the time before they have to react to it to recover their sang froid, while rash people use it to pour oil on the flames of their resentment.

15 The circles of success and failure

The very shocks that make it imperative for us to shift our mode of attack too often make it impossible for us to do so.

We crave more than we have, but we aspire to less than we ought. Victory leaves us complacent but not contented.

You pay for each of your triumphs by your need to stay on the prowl for the next one. Success spurs you to reprise it, and failure stings you to recoup it. Winning is one of the most narrowing of our addictions. Victory, as Nietzsche said, is not worth achieving if it doesn’t quench your thirst for it. Elsewise it will drag you down to an enthrallment from which you will never break free.

Victory is the worst teacher. It tempts you to reiterate your winning trick till it turns into a losing groove. The stupidest losers will at last learn to mimic the winning tack of their conquerors. And the cleverest winner will fall into the same mistakes as the losing enemies which they first vanquished by doing the opposite.

All that I love and hate, each of my cronies and foes, all my devotions and ventures, handcuff me to both hope and fear. Winning and losing both bind me more firmly to the world, and blind me more blackly to myself.

16 The punishment of undeserved success

Some people are used up by failure, and some by success. Ruthless opportunists are punished for obtaining what they don’t deserve by not deserving it. Their success supplants their self. But this is one loss that they are happy to bear. They are so pleased with themselves, that they feel they have been singled out for a great reward.

Those who have scooped an undeserved prize have just made a start of their travails. Now they must prove how scantly they deserve it, by parlaying it to scrounge more medals that they deserve still less.

The brazen beg so much for themselves. And the proud demand so much of themselves. ‘The gentleman,’ according to Confucius, ‘strives to deserve. The arrogant wish to get.’

17 The success of failure

Grant that you’re a failure, and you have earned an unparalleled and lonely success. But who would want the sad distinction of possessing the sensibility to be threshed by their own mediocrity and to be scarred by how unremarkable they are? Few of us feel our futility like a wound.

How brave you have to be to front your own failure. And how much nerve you need in order to go on living once you have done so.

If you know what real victory means, how could you deem that you are anything but a loser? But who aims so high or sees so clear, to discern that they have been worsted in the one venture that might be worth excelling in?

Each of us is doing what we are doing because we have failed to heed the call of some more worthwhile vocation.

DENIAL

18 We never see that we have failed

Our drubbings don’t lend us the self-awareness which alone might have made them worth the pain they cause us. We look on failure as a foreign land. A few of us may have strayed into it for a short stint. But none of us are enrolled as its permanent residents.

Failure is a diminished country, in which all seems as it was before, momentous, absorbing, and bright with hope.

Conceit makes us wild to win and too blind to see that we have lost.

Most people think so much of themselves, that they don’t have to win, and can’t grasp that they have lost. They are too pleased with who they are to be much put out by the massacre of their darling hopes.

I rate my own acumen and schemes too high to count myself a failure, and I rate others too low to count them as failures. I have done as much as anyone could do. And they have got more than their poor endowments deserve.

The one lesson that we learn from our failure is that someone else must be to blame for it. And so we learn nothing at all.

19 Sickened by success

We are too small to be disillusioned by our success. Our aspirations outstrip our abilities, but our smugness outweighs our disappointments.

Few of us have the pride either to see that we have failed or to be sickened by our sordid victories. Our minds are not large enough to size how small our success is.

How could I learn from my ill-luck or from my success? My defeats seem so small, that I can’t see them. And my success seems so massive, that I can’t see anything else. The least triumph lures me to think better of my talents, but the direst overthrow won’t convince me that I’m a failure. My success looks to me much larger than it is, though a little or perhaps a lot less than it ought to be.

20 Self-satisfied mediocrity

Our bungles may gain us so much, that they feel like the most brilliant victories. How many of the young will achieve what they set out to do? Yet how many of their elders bewail what poor things they have done? They have no doubt clinched a nice consolation prize or two, which they feign they were aspiring to the whole time. Or they forget what they were first levelling at. Or their eyes are still full of the victory that flutters just in front of their face.

A youngster daydreams of being elected president, and feels overjoyed when voted mayor of some backwoods market-town. Life tempts them so unstintingly with such measly pay, that they lose sight of the high aims that they once strained for.

Satan wears a grey suit. He doesn’t take you to a mountain top. He just buys you a meal, slips a few dollars in your wallet, and introduces you to some convivial companions.

Don’t ask a plodder what it feels like to be a failure. They don’t know a thing about it. Their eyes swim with the glitter of all their victories, and can’t make out the glowering futility which envelopes them. The tortoises feel thankful to the careless hares for reminding them what a sprinting success they have made of their own race.

My self-congratulation fattens my lanky wins, and lightens my heaviest discouragements.

21 The speed of failure

Failure, like my death, seems so far in the distance that it’s not real to me. I see it all round me, but I trust that it won’t come near me, though no doubt it’s with me right now. It waits close in front of me, or else it’s been here for a long time. It comes down as implacable as night. Defeat stalks me like my shadow wherever I go. But how could I descry it, when I am all day staring at the glinting sun of success that beams so bright in my face?

I fail so slowly, that I don’t see that it’s happening. And I rise so slowly, that I feel I have a right to do all I can to hurry it on. I don’t doubt that victory will atone for all the wrongs that I had to do to slash my way to it.

Failure seems as far away from us as our first hopes.

I look back on my days, and try to trace where failure, like a cancer, made its way into my bloodstream and began remorselessly invading each organ.

Persevere, and you will meet with unhoped for kinds of failure and frustration. What a consummation, to have failed more dismally than you ever dreamed you could.

Our life is a fit apprenticeship for abject failure.

22 Illusion is the staff of failure

The blindness that lures me to my ruin spares me from seeing that I am to blame for it. I need flimflam and self-flattery if I am to rise in the world. And I need them all the more when I fall. We don’t learn what we are, whether we fare too well or too wretchedly. Surrender might teach us generous lessons. ‘I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory,’ Pessoa wrote. But it makes most of us too poor to pay for them, while our self-possession tells us that we are too rich to need them. So we fail even at failure. We shrink to be unsuccessful failures or failed successes. I’m sure that my very repulses are a proof that I am like no one else and that I am bound to achieve at the last sortie some unexampled victory.

You are doubly defeated, if you can’t find some success in your deepest failure, and don’t discern the failure in your highest success.

We make nothing of our fall, since we lack the strength of mind to see the nothing that it has made of us.

No one dares tell the truth to the fortunate, since they are so formidable. And we hold off telling the truth to the vanquished, since they are so fragile. When I think I am sparing them the truth, I am sparing myself the unpleasantness of telling it. And even weak people are strong enough to make it clear that you are not to tell them the truth.

However cruelly life racks us, it fails to extract much of the truth from us.

23 Retreat

The sickness may make you too weak to stomach the remedy. But your dread of catching it may make you so afraid, that all you can do is try to shun it. What does not kill me makes me stronger, protests the dying animal. What does not kill me proves that I lack the spirit to kill myself when what made life worth living has left me. It leaves me too fagged for more than a skulking self-protection. Pull down the shutters and keep out the plague. Though prevention may seem preferable to cure, it may do more harm than the disease. ‘The torment of precaution,’ as Napoleon said, ‘is more excruciating than the pitfalls it seeks to avoid.’ How soon resilience shrivels into irresolution. Why not just end it?

24 Resilience

How could asses learn, when they have such stout backs? If they had been weaker, they may have had to grow wiser. They have the strength to bear the ill-effects of their own missteps, and so they have no reason to stop committing them.

The failure of all that I have worked for would be far more dire than death. So why am I still so unprepared to die when all that I have worked for has come to nought?

What does not kill me may make me too grasping to let go of life. And that may be the worst way for the soul to rot. It is the blind pertinacity of a cancer cell which has lost the capacity to die.

Losers have to work so hard to keep hold of the small remnant that is left to them, that they are at least distracted from regretting all that they have lost.

25 How we judge

I preen myself on my own evaluations of people and things. So why does their status and success sway me more than the intrinsic traits which would test their true worth? ‘Most judge people,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘by the favour that they have gained or by their fortune.’

In this world it is the fools who fix the grade of the wise, chiefly by the repute in which their fellow fools hold them. ‘The touchstone of truth,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘has come to be the multitude of believers, when the dolts in the crowd are so much more numerous than the wise.’

26 The bitch goddess Success

Human beings have never allowed reason to rule their minds. But they have always been ready to bow to power and success. They are too stubborn to yield to evidence, but they will yield to what is worse.

Reason, like right, has no heft in a case, till force and authority make it superrogatory. And now the sole authority that they know is numbers and the crowd. Quantity is the test of quality for those who lack the taste to judge quality.

What most impresses us about an event is the impression that it makes on others.

‘Success,’ as Nietzsche wrote, ‘has always been the great liar.’ At least that’s what we say till we succeed. And even if we fail, success is still the one thing that we all have faith in. Those who have been clobbered by years of bad luck still look on success as the hallmark of truth and worth. These are, as Burke put it, ‘the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements.’

Having seen how ready the world is to reward the cheap, the false, the pushy, the flaunting and the ephemeral, why do we still regard success as the one incontestable proof of true merit?

 

See also:          Self-interest,              Happiness