SUCCESS AND META-SUCCESS

We all want to succeed. Wanting to succeed is wire into us. We want to achieve our goals, our values, our intentions, our hopes, our dreams. It is part and parcel of being human. There’s nothing wrong with this at all. It’s part of living and surviving— reaching the values that are requirements for living.

So first level success, primary level success, is the fulfillment of our basic needs. This means that the biological definition of success is having enough to eat and drink, keep warm, etc. Part of the biological definition of success is to feel safe and secure, to have a social life so that we feel love and affection, and that we have sufficient sense of self so that we feel that we count, we matter, we have a place in the social/ political world.

By way of translation, most of us think of being “successful” as having sufficient money to take care of these needs, having a sufficient job that gives us a sense of safety and respect, and having sufficient amount of friends and family. Obviously these are all the “lower needs” on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they are our basic instinctoid needs that we share with the animals.

Yet when you are successful at this level, you are ready and prepared to enter into the human dimension of life. I didn’t realize this when I first read Maslow in the mid-1970s. I read through his classic work Motivation and Personality and did not realize that all of the lower needs are our animal needs, our physiological needs. Somehow I had mistakenly thought that the social needs (love and affection) and the self needs (self-regard, self-esteem) were higher needs and not animal needs. But they are not. The higher intelligent animals also have these needs. As social creatures, they live in communities, and thrive only through connection and support of each other. And the higher intelligent animals also have political structures from the top-dog, to the superior Alpha males so that their societies are comprised of a sense of self in the community.

And because we also have those needs as part of our biological nature, to be successful we have an instinctoid need for love and affection as well as a sense of self-regard in the communities that we live. So this, in part, explains why we all have these drives and experience them as some of our innate, intuitive drives.

From the Meta-States model, we can call all of that primary level success. And if we do so, then meta-success is succeeding at life in self-actualizing. This means moving out of the deficiency- driven needs that operate by lack, desperation, and competition and moving up into a whole new level of motivation, one that’s driven by abundance, expressiveness, and being-ness. Success at this level makes us truly human and fully human as it enables us to do human things and to engage in the human adventure. Here we strive for order, beauty, structure, justice, love, compassion, equality, contribution, meaningfulness, excellence, art, wonder, awe, and a thousand other things that make us uniquely human.

Now while primary success is for the most part objective, empirical, and therefore easily measured, not so with meta-success. While you can measure your income, your equity, how many cars you have, the amount of food, the quality of your shelter, the extent of coverage of your insurance policy, your status in an organization, your degrees, certifications, etc., it is immensely more difficult to measure meta-success. Why is that?

Meta-success is the quality of your life rather than the quantity of it.

The other day a friend of mine paraded his new Mercedes before me. I was impressed. “Nice car! Awesome!” I said wanting to congratulate him and give him some good feelings. Later at breakfast he talked about his worries with his relationships with several people and ongoing conflicts with management and competition with some others. Through the conversation I got the distinct impression that the new car was a way for him to salve on his wounded ego, a way to try to feel good about himself.

So I inquired, “Jim, if you were to gauge, what’s the quality of your life?” After exploring that question with him, he commented that he felt his life sucked, that he was on a decline, and that things were not going in the right direction. “So to make up for the quality of life you purchased an expensive car hoping that the quantity of that purchase would fulfill you, is that right?”

Long, long, long pause. Tears filled up his eyes. Countenance change. “Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that I unconsciously was hoping that if I bought something special just for me it would make me feel better.” “And how has it worked out to enrich the inner quality of your life so that you feel your life more rich and meaningful on the inside?” And, obviously, it had not.

Primary success is like that. It can only take us so far. And then, beyond a certain level of affluence, success at the primary levels of our needs actually becomes unfulfilling for true satisfaction. Why? Because meta-success is about your inner self, your spirit, and about your sense of the highest human values— the values that make life feel significant and meaningful. At that level it’s not about what you have, success is about what you give and contribute. At the highest level of success, it is about what you are and are becoming.

In the Psychology of Self-Actualization, this level of meta-success is what we call self- actualizing, experiencing our “full humanness,” and being “fully alive/ fully human.” How meta-successful are you today? How much more meta-success will you develop this year? Ready for a Meta-Coach to facilitate this with you?