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Pursue Success Like a Successful Person
Western culture embraces the notion that success is synonymous with having more money than you could ever spend or being nationally-recognized as the best at something. In sports, we find a measure of joy and satisfaction when our favorite sports squadron wins a national title. As fans, we find ourselves enjoying that success by proxy.
“My team won the [insert national title competition here],” we might say at the office water cooler.
Unless you’re Ryan Smith, they’re probably not your team.
Still, there’s an interesting thing that happens when you root for a particular team and they do well. Their success — even though your fandom contributes almost nothing to it — can have an immediate effect on the self-esteem and confidence of the fan. This is a phenomenon known as Basking in Reflected Glory or BIRGing. BIRGing hits the brain in some of the same way as personal achievement does.
We all know someone — maybe it’s ourselves — who seems to live by basking in their own former glory. The cliché version is the high school football star, now in his late 40s, who can’t seem to move beyond those glory days of being able to “throw a pig skin a quarter mile.” (Thank you Uncle Rico.)
Napoleon Dynamite and national pride aside, we don’t have to throw a football the way Tommy Frazier does in order to enjoy real success. Society tells us so measure success on a very large scale which can discourage us as we pursue “small” things in life. Using a national title scale to measure our success in losing those pesky fifteen pounds is a bit like measuring a high jumper’s record-breaking jump against the distance to the moon.
Where personal successes are concerned, there is only one metric that’s worthwhile: measuring where we are now against where we were.
Nir Eyal is an expert in the field of behavioral design and consumer psychology. I don’t know Nir personally, but it appears he’s one of the good guys in behavioral design, not one of those who is trying to keep you glued to your phone all day, every day.
In a recent article titled “Why Successful People Only Get More Successful,” Nir makes two powerful arguments to support the idea that our personal success should only be measured against…
