Success: not at what cost, but to what end?
What Kind of Success Are We Pursuing? A brief unpacking the values and visions that guide our destinations. Part 1 in a series on re-considering how success can look in 2025 and beyond.
For a somewhat philosophical framing to this series, I will discuss a foundational problem space when it comes to mentoring others, leading projects, and otherwise aspiring to go to new places. At the core is considering the components of success that various destinations, or alignments with various value sets, entail.
This post is about whose advice to take. Or, at least, critical questioning of what goes into both receiving and delivering advice.
Whose Advice To Take?
To start with some controversial sentiments: we often here “Never take advice from someone you wouldn't trade places with.” Well then perhaps no one should take advice from anyone, given the state of this world.
Yet, rather than dismissing advice altogether, the real challenge is to discern which guidance aligns with the future we want to create.
Whether or not you have a positive sentiment about the world as-it-stands, I would invite continuing to explore the framing of destination, or intended direction. Is the world developing in a way you would hope?
Consider the idea that the advice we value should come from those who are actively working toward building that future—people who are on a journey toward a destination we aspire to.
While we may never have a perfect roadmap, having a clear vision allows us to gauge our progress and adjust our course accordingly. We may recall the sage Mr. Fred Rogers encouraging us to “look for the helpers”, when times are tough. We generally don’t have the advantage of knowing what specific strategy would be the best as we venture into the unknown future, but, through having a clear goal or destination, we can at least measure our distance from it in a useful manner..
It is from this vantage point I’d like to center the discussion on mentoring, guiding, and empowering others to pursue courses of direction. When applicable, I am to offer perspective as a leader or facilitator of innovation, research, mentoring, or guidance - or as someone seeking to find such a guide; as someone attempting to discern if an environment they are in will afford opportunities to go in their chosen direction.
In terms of whose advice to take, and reframing, perhaps reconsidering “success”, there are a number of core factors which constitute the determination. One such factor assuredly pertains to one's approach to systemic buy-in.
Systemic Buy-In: Convention, Prestige, or Progress?
From choosing and advisor, to a therapist, to a doctor, a ubiquitous challenge in modernity is the selection of some form of specialized expert, who will dispense wisdom and help you face a (potentially largely) unknown problem space.
We will all likely face the challenges of seeking medical or financial help for ourselves, our elders, or children. A core choice to make is how much you give credence to their level of systemic buy-in; that is, do they believe whatever arena they are operating within is working just fine, and they are simply an arbiter of its conventions - or are they open to considering alternatives, or sympathetic to convention-breaking approaches? There are seldom (initially obvious) right answers here, but rather, it’s a matter of how much risk and what kind of expertise you’d prefer to hire.
In terms of innovation spaces, perhaps the spectrum here is modified towards what kind of “progressive” approach is best. An example from my own life is hearing a (university) lab PI remark “well, I’ve never heard of them before”, as a way to dismiss or at least diminish the prospects of pursuing a particular conference or publication. But for someone seeking to get a tenure track position the way she did, it was a warranted consideration.
So questions to consider are, what kind of success, or prestige is valued, within an environment? Academia is rapidly changing in many ways, as are publication opportunities, but where is it that one wants to go? Even deeper questions may be - what do you want your personal role to be in such changes, from being an engineer, a developer, designer, to product or project manager, or many other spaces to be in? And what kind of teams or personalities would complement you? There is a natural dovetail here into things like 80,000 Hours, a project from Effective Altruism group. We well surely discuss this in the future in greater depth, in terms of what their take on success looks like, and how they promote alignment with how they understand the future may unfold.
For early career researchers & innovators to consider:
These kinds of questions may seem impossible to understand as an underclassmen or perhaps even an early career researcher, and yet attempting to discuss them is often difficult to do as someone more senior in the field. It’s hard to earnestly convey the strengths and weaknesses of a situation, or at least, it can be difficult to easily convey the pressures and influences on why the environment is the way it is.
A goal of this series will be to give more context for literacy and decision making around such topics.
Whose Advice to take, Revisited
If the opening question is about whose advice to take, underneath the umbrella of what does - or what can - success look like, perhaps we can distill it to the following:
Instead of don’t take advice from anyone whose (present) circumstances you do not want to recreate for yourself, we may do well to consider seeking advice, or modeling success, after those who who are living and building out the future in a way most aligned with the potential futures you hope to see come into existence.
The implied difference here has to do with encouraging healthy skepticism about both the origins and sustainability of current success - and even within innovation-centric or future-promoting spaces, this can be overlooked. There are countless formulas for exploiting the present, or the mesh point between the present and when innovation turns around and shapes the world. But even in light of ideas critical of clearly defined goals, such as the seminal work Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman, I feel there is something more to be said.
There is a place for pivoting and riding the wave of what is tenable within the relative Overton Window of this time - but where should the Window go? What are the small, potentially irrelevant, or marginally important components that may ultimately enable systemic shift? It is fair to say that it might outrightly be impossible to know any of this, so why bother focusing on it at all. But that, to me, feels like shirking some of the responsibility, especially for those earnestly seeking to shape, change, or cultivate various possible futures. Or, at the very least, if I was giving someone advice, I’d implore them not to overlook that destinations, and the selection of them, and the associated intentionality of these choices, does indeed matter.
At the same time, it is wise to study those who have achieved conventional success—even if your aim is to pursue a different path. Traditional success stories offer invaluable lessons on economic resilience, practical survival, and the etiquette that sustains established systems. By understanding these conventional models, you can glean insights into the fundamentals of thriving in any environment, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or carve out a new trajectory.
It is a strange thing to be in a world dominated by decisions, and now of late, data documenting those decisions (and technologies, methods, and implementations), which all has not yet led to the kind of world we might prefer to have.
I hope this series of discussions can afford, for the inquiring innovator, things to reflect on along the way - and perhaps a sense of companionship in the process.
I’ll close with lyrics that humorously popped into my mind at the conclusion of writing:
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten
I will add: indeed, no one else can feel it for you, drench yourself in worlds unspoken, and don’t be daunted in diving into the messiness of how things became how they are, even if it seems particularly souring. I started writing this post, and developing this series of essays and discussions, well before Early 2025 where it it will first be published. As such, I may be even harder leaning into the empowerment of choices and selecting choices, than originally intended. We will need to support each other in finding new, different, better, reconsidered, and simply alternative pathways ahead, than anything else we’ve known thus far.
Cheers to that journey.
-Jesse
A taste of things to come
A broad preview of some topics ahead - please comment if any of them seem particularly of interest to you and I may be able to prioritize such:
Mountains, Monasteries, Metropolis
Mentoring in a World of Myriad Paths to Take
GOLD Leadership Lessons: Theory.X vs Theory Y
Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership
Academia vs Industry
Advice from Older Generations isn’t Relevant Any More (Or is it?)
Should I get a PhD
Systemic Buy-In: Strategies and Practical Applications
Going fast, going far
The proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” | “He doesn’t want to win today, he wants to win forever” & Relation to James P. Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games (1986)
Do you want to “win forever”, or perhaps more pertinently, does the path you seek go down lead to other paths? Granted the inability to determine this, particularly wiht available tools, how can we enable literacy and empower vision, as we are building out the future?
Beyond “Demo or Die”: Designing and Maintaining Incubators
How to design, cultivate, and build out spaces is its own unique challenge. Particularly given that many of the actors or contributors of such spaces are itinerant
What spaces do you need to be in to succeed
How do you grow or maintain a space where others can grow/shine/develop/explore ?