A New Vision of Success
Success is usually viewed in financial and career terms. The more money you have in the bank, the more financial wealth you create, the more successful you are. The higher the rung in the corporate ladder you rise, the more others can measure your social status. Life, from this vantage point, is a competition featuring winners and losers, and you don’t want to be a loser.
Competition occurs in nature as well as our everyday experience. Rivalrous competition has been the cause of both glory and infamy in human history. Yet since the idea of the “survival of the fittest” took hold in the 19th century, the role of cooperation in nature and human life has been given short shrift—until recently. According to biologist Bruce Lipton, evidence from over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles point to cooperation and mutual aid as a deep human instinct. “As it turns out, Darwin was wrong,” he says. “Cooperation and community are actually the underlying principles of evolution, as well as the underlying principles of cell biology.”
When human beings decide to work together toward common goals and purposes, to collaborate to reach agreed upon ends, whether for survival as bands, clans, and tribes; building wonders of the world such as the ancient pyramids; or to navigate across uncharted waters and lands to discover and expand, nothing other than natural disasters, war, or human folly can stop us. Of course, as made clear in the sobering documentary, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, the impact of humans on the ecology of the planet since the advent of industrialism has been disastrous.
David Attenborough
The predicaments facing the human family, from environmental suicide, the threat of nuclear conflagration, the impact of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence on the world of work, to extreme economic and developmental gaps internationally and intra-nationally, threaten our collective future. Some call these threats a meta-crisis or polycrisis. In fact, as I’ve mentioned in past posts, author and social visionary Duane Elgin has been saying since the 1980s that by the 2020s, we humans will experience a breakdown or a breakthrough. In forecast after forecast, we are told that we have a little as ten years to begin turning our ship around.
Can we reframe and redefine “success” for a breakthrough rather than a breakdown? As an individual or a whole species, survival just isn’t enough. Humans have common aspirations. All human beings, says blues musician Daryl Davis*, want to be loved, respected, heard, treated fairly, and to have for our families what others want for theirs. And since communications and media technology has made the varying lifestyles of people around the world readily accessible, the desire to have more material security and opportunity has become almost a given. Seeing, reading or hearing about a better life can inspire people to act, to, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, stride toward freedom. Growth, learning, and prosperity are keys to success, to personal and collective fulfillment. This is why we need a new vision and definition of success.
Success: A New Narrative
Our times call for a new narrative of success: humans flourishing through mastery and collaboration. Readers of this blog know that jazz music is an excellent metaphor for individual mastery and what creativity researcher and jazz pianist Keith Sawyer calls “group genius.”
One goal of this blog is to present the art and science of mastery in personal, cultural, and social terms. As a jazz artist learns music basics, develops an individual sound and style, and matures in knowledge and skill to play with others in a wide range of tempos and moods, personal mastery advances resilience in body, mind, emotions, and spirit. In jazz, resilience is synonymous with the ability to swing, to adapt to complex situations with flexibility and dexterity. The Institute of Heart Math has a graphic for such four-fold resilience:
Attaining personal mastery in these four basic domains grounds inner coherence, clarity of personal identities and voice, and serves as a foundation of excellence in all walks of life, from family to friendship to professional. Personal mastery is being the best you can be, moment by moment, minute by minute, day by day.
Cultural Mastery
Cultural mastery is first understanding and living your culture with others, sharing mutual feelings, meanings, values, and tools, followed by a comfort with other cultures, embracing difference and distinction yet maintaining your own grounding. Such cultural mastery, as displayed by jazz masters, develops through deliberate, deep, fluid practice and engagement. “When people share the same lifestyle, environment, and traditions, they form as a culture,” says author and business culture expert Stan Slap, “with a purpose of sharing beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity.”
Taking Slap’s definition, culture can be seen in terms of groups of people in companies, ethnicities, regions, nations, even the globe. Such awareness of how and why, from small collectives to larger, we can share a “We” space, is what I call “conscious culture.”
Social Mastery
Social mastery is relationship prowess as friends, lovers, parents, co-workers, and co-leaders, on scales small (duets and trios) to larger systems (big band), rising to a communal, community awareness. Social mastery also entails the skill to be among strangers, recognizing common humanity while avoiding the Scylla of “fear of the other,” and the Charybdis of attraction solely because others are exotic. In democratic societies, social mastery is also an ability to engage in conversation with those you disagree with, to be okay with the blues of losing an election, understanding that you can come back to deliberate and win another day.
Winning occurs through collaboration and isn’t opposed to competition. Collaboration and competition dance together as “antagonistic cooperation.” Variations on this idea are “competitive cooperation” and what psychologist and education philosopher terms “cooperative opposition.” As recent scientific and historical studies have shown, innovation and creativity are not solo endeavors; groups of people are always involved. The same is true for collaboration and competition; it takes two to a few to tango.
Reframing Competition
Indeed, the word compete is made up of the Latin prefix com, which means “with” or “together,” and the root peto, meaning “to go out or seek.” Dr. George Sheehan, in This Running Life, explains that “competition is simply each of us seeking our absolute best with the help of each other. What we do magnifies each other, inspires each of us. The race is a synergistic society where what accrues to one accrues to all, a society in which everyone can be a winner.”
The new model of success as human flourishing through mastery and collaboration aligns the wisdom of the humanities, with jazz at its most sublime, and with recent findings in science.
The humanities—art, literature, geography, music, philosophy, history, language, and religion—show us that there are commonalities and distinctions among humans in various times and places. That men and women think, feel, love, dream, separate, fight, make families, and create cultures and societies. That we communicate through language and stories. That we develop and grow through common stages, whether as an individual, from childhood through old age, or via worldviews such as indigenous, traditional, modern, postmodern, and beyond. That we create forms in space to extend ourselves in time, such as art, music, dance, theater, film, as well as institutions and systems. That we use ideas to survive and thrive, to govern and liberate, to see across time what has been and what might yet be.
In the past few decades, the science of peak performance has opened vistas of understanding of human potential as individuals and as collaborators. Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to re-wire based on experience, has, through functional brain imaging, revealed that the human brain does not stop developing in adulthood. Neural networks contained in the heart and gut are called by some scientists the second and third brains, which allows a person to align thoughts, feelings, and “gut” intuition through a class of neurons called spindle cells. Epigenetics is the influence of perception, belief, attitudes, lifestyle, and environment upon your very genes. So not only is the brain not fixed—your genes aren’t either.
Each person has more choice and power to change his or herself than ever before in human history. Barriers certainly exist—habits, insecurity, fear, trauma, as well as social and economic obstacles. Just because you can change doesn’t mean it will be easy. But once we know change is possible, is within reach, that we can rewire our three brains to pivot from being self-defeating to self-affirming, from being a victim to a victor in competition with, not against, others, why not go for it?
[*Through music, dialogue, and empathy, Daryl Davis famously inspired 200 Ku Klux Klan members to give up their KKK robes.]