Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about success. Why?
1. Very few people do. We have tons of literature about failure but not a lot about dealing with success.
2. I’ve seen it wreck good people, myself included.
3. We think it will make us happy, whole and known. And it doesn’t.
That last point might be the most important. Want to see someone sad? Find a person who got everything they ever wanted and then realized it wasn’t enough. It’s crushing to reach the peak of a mountain only to discover there’s another one behind it. And another one. And another one.
Recently, John Mayer addressed the happiness myth on Twitter. (My friend Jonnie W. pointed this out to me.) In a single sentence, someone who has scaled the heights of success very honestly warned the rest of us who are climbing.
I’ll let him tell the rest of the story.