Scroll 4 - The Success Paradox

When will you finally consider yourself successful? In the fourth Scroll of The Scrolls of Reflection, Zaib Shamsi explores the relationship between ambition, achievement and the strange experience of reaching something you once desperately wanted — only for it to quickly become your new normal. Why can an achievement feel extraordinary while we are pursuing it, yet ordinary once we have it? Why do ambitious people continually move the finish line? Can we become objectively more successful while still feeling as though we are permanently behind? And how much of our definition of success did we actually choose for ourselves? Drawing on psychology, engineering, systems thinking and lived experience, Zaib explores hedonic adaptation, shifting expectations and the way achievements can gradually become part of our baseline rather than evidence of how far we have travelled. This Scroll introduces The Success Paradox: the idea that the more success we achieve, the more evidence we may have that we are successful — yet the harder it can become to actually feel successful. It also examines the measurements we use to judge our lives. Qualifications, salaries, job titles, followers, awards and other visible metrics can provide useful information, but when the measurement becomes the objective, we risk optimising one part of our lives while ignoring the wider system. Success can change our circumstances. It cannot automatically tell us what those circumstances mean. Perhaps ambition does not require us to stop climbing. Perhaps it requires us to occasionally recognise the mountain we are already standing on. What if the challenge is not simply learning how to succeed, but learning how to succeed without becoming incapable of experiencing success? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The Scrolls of Reflection Hosted by Zaib Shamsi, Biomedical Engineer. Exploring life through reflection, lived experience, human behaviour, science, engineering and systems thinking — from ambition, resilience and identity to failure, relationships, health, technology and the process of rebuilding. New Scrolls every Monday and Thursday. Scars become blueprints, and the things we stay silent about are given a voice. © Zaib Shamsi. The Scrolls of Reflection. All rights reserved.