Chip Scholz has spent about thirty years as an executive coach, and he now describes himself as an author, a speaker, and a craftsman who turns wood on a lathe. One question sits at the center of his work. He asks people to name the five or six things that make up success for them. He has asked it thousands of times, and in all those answers no one has ever named the big house, the boat, or the corner office. People name their families. They name making a difference. Financial stability almost always appears, but as a floor to stand on rather than a prize to win.
The corner office, it turns out, has a remarkable number of applicants for something nobody admits to wanting.
That pattern is worth sitting with, because most lives are not arranged as if it were true. Look at how a working week actually gets spent. The hours go to the title, the next promotion, the house that needs a bigger mortgage to stay impressive, and whatever remains on Sunday afternoon goes to the people at the top of the list. If someone wrote down their definition of success and then handed over their calendar, the two documents would often seem to belong to different people.
It would be easy to call this hypocrisy, but that reading doesn’t hold up. People are not lying when they say family matters most. The more likely explanation is that the life was assembled long before anyone asked the question. A son goes into sales because his father was a gifted salesman and that was the shape a man’s life took in that house. A daughter in a trucking family has been working the loading dock since she was eight, and the business is simply the air she breathes. By the time anyone asks what success means, the answer has already been built into the structure of the days, and someone else’s expectations did most of the building.
This is where it gets harder. Work that was chosen for us has a way of becoming who we are. A founder who is seventy and still running the company is usually not holding on out of greed. He cannot imagine who he would be on a Tuesday morning without it. Somewhere along the way the business stopped being his work and became his name, and the cost lands on the very people he would have put on his list: the children waiting to take over, the Thanksgiving table with empty chairs.
Thoreau wrote in Walden that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. The word that matters there is quiet. Nothing looks wrong from the outside. The career is fine, the house is fine, and something underneath keeps asking whether this is really the life.
What is striking is how steady the answers stay across a lifetime. Twenty-year-olds and seventy-year-olds name nearly the same things. What changes is how those things get lived. Making a difference at thirty might mean building something. At seventy it might mean teaching someone a craft on a Saturday morning. The goal holds. Only its expression moves.
If someone asked you tonight for the five or six things that make up success, how much of this past week would those things recognize?
There is no need to answer quickly. The list is usually already there, written somewhere beneath the obligations.
Take a moment to reflect on where your best hours are going, and on what it might look like to let the things you would actually name receive a little more of them.
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© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen