What is success?

[Sistamatic]

http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073...appiness-beats

The article is about the man who has the highest measured IQ. By age 3, he was already more learned in some academic areas than most people become in a lifetime. But he feels as though the impetus on a genius to do great things is unfair. He quit his NASA job at age 18 after working there for ten years, moved back to Korea, and decided he wanted an ordinary life.

So what kind of success do you strive for? Do you feel like other people's expectations of you exceed your own ambitions? Do you think having an unusual potential for prodigious achievement comes with a responsibility to reach your potential?

If you had a child with the same intellectual potential as Kim Ung-Yong, how would you raise him or her?

[jigglypuff]

i wanna be happy & healthy, learning all the time and making contributions i can be proud of.

i agree with most other people's expectations of me when it comes to potential and believe they mean well.

in some cases it comes with responsibility, depending on the value of the contribution that can be made.

idk about how i'd raise a child like that, but as a general rule i'd reward children not for being smart but for working hard and making effort, and would be encouraging and attentive to specific interests/tendencies/gifts if applicable. their life is their own and i'd want them to determine their own pursuits ultimately, regardless of their intelligence or natural tendencies they're born with.

[username]

Success is to be able to motivate myself to commit to certain activities that absorb me to a point where I "lose myself" /ego.
And even if over time i manage to execute perfectly those activities, keep on doing them and keep been absorbed in them.
The purpose is not to convince myself or others that i am capable of doing perfectly those activities, but to have less free time to ponder whether i should keep doing them or why i keep doing them and running a high risk of abandoning them and dive into a vicious internal existential philosophical cycle.

Its a roller coaster.

Whenever i take a break from my hobbies i feel guilty and i feel like shit.
I dont know if this is healthy.
I mean its like a dependency and hate not been independent.

You see ..there i go again .
I hate this.

[Architect]

Most of us have two minds, which is what we think we want, and what we really want.

What we think we want is often related to our inferior (Fe for the INTP), or through our neocortex based personality (such as a childhood ideas or inculcation). They're not all bad, much of our conscious neocortex desires are good, but we have to carefully examine them to see if they also are a real desire.

What we really want are usually related to our cortex and fundamental Type (my theory of Type is that it is based on how the brain processes information in the cortex). This need can be obscured by our learned personality (in the neocortex).

For example, in my case I thought I wanted to be some high ranking manager in my company, and I thought I didn't want to spend the rest of my time writing code. Fact is however that I got a huge bang out of being a Software Engineer. After introspection (an interesting story how I figured this out) I found that the desire for wealth and position really came from something I picked up from my father who was an executive at a pharmaceutical company. My real desire was to find my Peter Principle; i.e. rise to the level of my own incompetence (and keep writing code, solving problems, and being generally brilliant).

So I've had one promotion to "Expert" engineer and that's as far as I'm going. My true desire is to learn everything I can about computers and do lots of stuff. My managers (being good ones, unlike me who would have been a bad one) recognized this and throw all the interesting stuff at me. My ultimate goal is to in the next ten years cut away before early retirement age for my own company. So the good ending to the story is that I finally aligned my true desires with my conscious desires.

[Perdix]

I view life as a game, with money being the points inside it.

Ever since I was twelve I've had the same goal: make as much money as possible. It's working out pretty well for me so far .

[Thevenin]

My true desire is to learn everything I can about computers and do lots of stuff.

If you continue to do this, your level of incompetence will keep changing, i.e., your proficiency will increase.

[Thevenin]

I view life as a game, with money being the points inside it.

Ever since I was twelve I've had the same goal: make as much money as possible. It's working out pretty well for me so far .

As a goal, this gets boring. After several million, you can basically do just about anything you want, personally, except maybe screw up the political system. IMO, the best way to make money is as a consequence of other goals. And, if in achieving those goals, you do good and help people, so much the better for you and the rest of us.

[Perdix]

As a goal, this gets boring. After several million, you can basically do just about anything you want, personally, except maybe screw up the political system. IMO, the best way to make money is as a consequence of other goals. And, if in achieving those goals, you do good and help people, so much the better for you and the rest of us.

I want to help people in the long run, I just need money to do a significant amount of good. I also want to partially de-corrupt the political system in America, however this too takes massive amounts of money.

[Night]

As intelligent as Kim Jong-Un? We should all be so lucky!

To answer your question - and also because of it/your example, the measure of success in this case is a statement of exceptionalism: an occurrence that is sufficiently abnormal as to warrant spectacle. As to cause amazement.

To me, the measure of one's success isn't really linked to attributes of birth. This is a good thing for everyone who isn't your example. Genetic inheritance provides a baseline for predicting future types of success, but isn't always a guarantee of it. High intelligence can be linked to favorable personal qualities like social grace, emotional wisdom and financial security. Or, it could lead to the converse.

Being sufficiently different from what's typical can encourage fortune, or it can induce destruction. It depends on the individual and how he chooses to use whatever traits are packed into the fingerprints of his heredity.

So, what does this mean? It means that one some level, everyone finds a measure of success. Everyone. So as success is pretty universal, it matters less to our lives than what most probably think. What makes one great - truly extraordinary, is how we respond to adversity. To hardship. Anyone can revel in victory. Doesn't take much talent to stay motivated to win -- doubly so when you're already on top.

Finding motivation in depression and having the gall to keep moving forward demonstrates real tenacity.


Success is what happens when we refuse to let failure win. Not when we do what we're already good at.

[stuck]

I have an odd relationship with my ambition. I've achieved my goals- they turned out to be modest enough because they relied on me and my huge appetite for music and sound- originate this certain type of music, originate this other certain type of music, hear this or that on the radio. I achieved these things and then quit music.

I was monetarily induced back into the fold, later. I made some other goals, year by year stretching over five years, this time measured by more objective signposts. They are elaborate and extremely optimistic, and I don't know if I can achieve them or not.

At the same time, the subject of my new olympian goals is not something I focus on except for in tiny slices now and then. The reason for this is that I've found that I have to wash my brain of everything when I actually sit down to work, to instead be caught in the moment and stay focused on what the music listener in me wants: creativity, love.

So, at the same time, I'm self-actualized, delusional, and totally ambitionless.