The Myth of Success

What If Your Definition Was Never Yours?

Someone in the room—your boss, a client, a teacher—says something with conviction. It doesn’t sit right. But when you scan the faces around you, everyone nods.

So you do too.

This is how collective illusions begin. Not with indoctrination, but with subtle dissonance we choose to ignore.

Collective illusions, as Todd Rose calls them, are beliefs we adopt because we think everyone else agrees—even when, privately, most of us don’t. They don’t require manipulation—just the deeply human fear of standing alone.

It’s how smart, well-meaning people end up chasing things they never truly wanted, and get stuck on that path.

Rose spent years studying these patterns. But one of his most surprising findings came from a question we should be asking ourselves more often:

What does it mean to live a successful life?

He asked thousands to predict how most people would rank 76 attributes of a successful life.

The top guess?

Fame.

Then he asked them to rank the same attributes based on their own values.

Fame didn’t just drop—it came in dead last. 76th out of 76.

What people thought others valued most was what they personally cared about least.

What’s most revealing, though, is what happened when he searched for a common thread in the responses: there wasn’t one. No universal blueprint for a meaningful life. Each person carried a different map of what mattered.

And yet, we still chase the same trophies. We measure ourselves against follower counts, job titles, glossy vacations. We post not what moves us, but what might signal we’re winning.

Why?

Because what begins as an illusion in one generation becomes private conviction in the next.

The Inheritance

We’re born with a blank canvas. But that canvas quickly absorbs the traces of everything that came before us.

From the beginning, we step into a world already shaped by past choices and past beliefs.

We enter systems that reward obedience and call it potential. We’re taught that curiosity is distracting, that stillness is virtue, that achievement is everything. Recognition becomes a proxy for meaning—not because we choose it, but because we’re trained to seek it, and praised when we comply.

Eventually, the stakes rise. Social media adds scale and spectacle. Suddenly achievement is not just about approval—it’s about attention. Influence. Envy.

Post more. Grow faster. Signal your ascent.

This narrative is reinforced from every angle: your peers, your feed, the fiction you consume.

And because conformity is often a survival strategy, your instinct to fit in fights hard to override your critical thinking. You begin to believe that success requires acceptance. That to stay inside the circle, you have to adopt the tribe’s definition—and repeat it.

So you trade your strange, original ideas for the safety of agreement.

You inherit an illusion—and call it your own.

The Writer’s Mirage

Nowhere is this illusion more vivid than in the idea of the “successful writer.”

There’s the old myth: the tortured genius who shuns the marketplace, writes in agony, and dies misunderstood—only to be canonized after death.

Then there’s the new one: the creator-as-writer. Strategic. Optimized. Audience-aware. Someone who posts daily, grows a brand, and monetizes relentlessly.

In both cases, the writer becomes a symbol. One suffers for purity. The other thrives on visibility.

But both can distort the thing that made writing matter in the first place.

The act becomes performance. The exploration becomes execution. And eventually, you stop asking why you started.

But there’s a third version—rarely talked about, but quietly alive. A kind of writer who refuses both myths. Not the tortured genius removed from the world, and not the hyper-visible creator building content machines. This version is harder to market, maybe harder to see. But it exists.

This writer keeps going, even after seeing through the illusions. They know what attention can do to a voice. They understand how easily the work can become performance, how quickly curiosity can be replaced by strategy. And still, they write. Not because it guarantees success. But because it’s how they make sense of things. It’s how they stay close to themselves in a world that pulls us in every direction.

They’re not chasing obscurity or relevance. They’re just staying with the thread of something that matters to them. Maybe the work reaches a big audience, maybe it stays small. But the measure isn’t reach—it’s resonance. Did it feel true? Did it change something? Did it help them see more clearly?

This kind of writing doesn’t always look impressive from the outside. It’s slow. Sometimes scattered. It doesn't announce itself with authority. But it creates space—for the writer, and maybe for the reader too. Space to think, to return, to remember what it feels like to say something that hasn’t been optimized for applause.

They write because something inside them insists on being named. And maybe, somewhere, someone else sees it too—and feels a little less alone.

That kind of connection doesn’t show up on a dashboard. It doesn’t scale. But it stays with you. And often, it’s enough to keep going.

Which brings us back to the idea of success.

Todd Rose discovered that there’s no single definition of success—and not because we’re confused or misguided, but because we’re human. We’re complex. What matters to you might not matter to me. That’s not a failure of the system; it’s the beginning of sanity.

If your path is slow, let it be slow. If you find your voice online, write there. If you love poetry, keep writing poems.

The illusion dies the moment you stop performing for it.

So don’t just unlearn the myths. Replace them.

Not with a new dogma, but with the version that stays true when no one’s watching.

The one that shows up when you're not proving anything.

The one that is you.

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