Grandes Temas en Dos Volumenes

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

“Here’s some insight about success: you can’t be successful at everything. We hear a lot about work-life balance nonsense, you can’t have it all. So any vision of success has to admit what it’s losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept […] that there’s is gonna be an element where we’re not succeeding.

And the thing about a successful life, is that a lot of the time our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own, they’re sucked in from other people. […]

So what I want to argue you for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own, we should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t in fact what you wanted all along.”