When Success Brings Zero Fulfillment

Generally, it is assumed that success will always lead to a happy life. Accordingly, it is a long-standing notion of parents and mentors that if a young person completes their high school education, graduates from college, then finds a good job, gets married, and starts raising a family while continuing an upward climb on the career ladder, a happy and fulfilling life will ensue.

While this supposition sounds reasonable, a careful examination reveals that a happy life requires much more than a litany of accomplishments. Success merely connotes the satisfactory completion of a goal, task, venture, or project, and a successful life is a life marked by multiple achievements—as people around you can objectively affirm and may applaud.

In contrast, happiness is a subjective feeling of satisfaction, and a happy life is your sense of satisfaction about your life based on your own self-assessment—not what others see in you or think about you. Therefore, a successful life is an appraisal that an observer can make about you, whereas a happy life is strictly an appraisal only you can make about yourself.

A very successful and enviable man or woman can, of course, still be unhappy.

Patty Stonesifer, for example, was a very successful and desirable achiever on a national scale. She rose through the ranks in the technology industry and was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in America in 1996. She served as chair on several prestigious boards, including the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents and the White House Council for Community Solutions. She was, for 10 years, the cochair and founding CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—in charge of a $38.7 billion endowment. She was by every measure a successful woman.

On April 1, 2013, she gave it all up to become the head of Martha’s Table, a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, which serves and feeds people experiencing poverty. Despite her professional accomplishments, an enviable income, and a successful life, she realized an emptiness in her life that had to be filled. She consequently embarked on a new mission of feeding people experiencing poverty to have a meaningful life and be fulfilled.

Similarly, Narayanan Krishnan, a young man of enviable talent and success, seemed to have it all. He had accomplished his long-term dream of becoming a successful chef by working hard to complete a prestigious apprenticeship and studying under world-class mentors in the highly competitive field of cooking and catering.

Eventually, he became a well-paid, award-winning chef, working for a high-end five-star hotel group in India. Because of his natural talent, hard work, and acquired skills, he was placed on a short list for promotion to an elite job assignment in Switzerland.

He was already bound for Europe when he saw an older man eating his human waste. Krishnan was so struck with horror and pity that this singular experience awakened in him a personal spiritual compulsion to do something substantive about such a poignant human condition. Despite his prospect of becoming a top chef in Switzerland, Krishnan abandoned his overseas travel plans and instead decided to stay in India and use his profession as a chef to fulfill a larger mission of feeding the hungry and homeless on the streets.

Convinced of his new destiny, Krishnan smiled with joy when describing the gift of personal peace, satisfaction, and contentment that he has received as a result of his new mission. During the CNN Heroes of 2010 Award broadcast, he said, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life because there is a driving force, an inspiration, and a flame inside of me.”

Other accomplished individuals have similarly switched from their successful endeavors to attend to other pressing pangs of hunger in their lives—in search of personal fulfillment. This switch from a successful endeavor to a different line of a more fulfilling engagement is not always exclusively driven by the desire to go philanthropic.

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For example, highly decorated civil servants and accomplished politicians quit their positions of tremendous success, influence, power, and authority to spend more time with family or, unapologetically, to make more money in the private sector.

Not unusual are celebrities in music, theatrical arts, or sports who, later in life, go back to school and become engaged in intellectual pursuits despite their enviable success and current affluence. Also, there are stories of very successful and accomplished Catholic priests who have eventually denounced their vows of celibacy due to feelings of unfulfillment.

In each case, someone simply addresses the perceived void in their own life—upon self-appraisal. The common feature in all these stories is the paradox of lack of fulfillment amid apparent success.

If you ever feel unfulfilled despite many achievements, my singular recommendation is to probe deep into your soul, introspectively search for your true essence, and make the needed change. Practically speaking, and for lack of space—simply follow the recommendation below.

What You Can Do

First, objectively confirm how unhappy you are by calculating your personal happiness index (PHI) to see where you are on the human happiness spectrum. Knowing how happy or unhappy you truly are and where you would want to be on the scale, do the following two things either on your own or with the help of a happiness coach:

1. Identify your true life calling.
2. Design a customized personal daily routine (PDR) to actualize.

Good luck.