A Guide to the Scientific Career

This tricky question needs to be addressed first: how do you define success? From there, you move to understanding and setting the metrics that best reflect how to measure it. Choose a measurement that inspires your pursuit of success, something that matches your personal values or business values. Once you have a scale, you need to track your measurements with a dashboard or chart that keeps the information simple and understandable.

Success, however it is defined, changes your life. And in this change, you come to see the importance of giving back. Giving back enriches not only the lives of others but also the successful individual. As such, societal contribution is a metric by which you should define how success has affected you. Do you give back to your community? To those less fortunate?

Having reached a point in life where you can not only take care of yourself but also provide for others, a successful person is positioned to realize the concept of self‐actualization, to become a complete being who is satisfied on every level. This level of awareness makes you more receptive to the plight of others and, hopefully, more giving of your excess time and resources.

Success breeds kindness in those who recognize the struggle.

Being true to yourself is important for success, but also for how you see others. If you have taken control of your life, you begin to see the importance of mentoring others to do the same. You need to be fueled by something greater than yourself to be successful, but it also means asking yourself meaningful questions. Who are you? What do you care about? How can you help?

Happiness and success are interdependent; it is difficult to achieve real success without happiness. Success in life is subjective, but is no doubt predicated on the pursuit of your dreams – of what makes you happy. If the pursuit or achievement of success does not come with happiness, with a balance of what matters, then can we truly call it success?

If you must sacrifice happiness for success, then what is success?

Quality of life can be measured by various metrics, but chief among them is happiness as an indicator. If you work long hours to acquire wealth, and had previously defined that as success, then does that simple math equate to success? What if you cannot pursue anything other than the acquisition of wealth at the expense of sharing and experiencing the joy in life? How do we reconcile the interdependence of happiness and success?

Identification of success and being able to measure it, as described in a previous section, helps us to understand whether we have been successful if we have traded one for the other.

Fame and success are often conflated because they look so similar. The wealth, prestige and access that comes with fame looks very much like what most people would define as success. However, fame is dependent on success in a particular domain. Were you a famous physicist, then you would be well known in your field and would have achieved a level of fame in direct proportion to your success in that field.

The trickiness of this independence arises when we do not fully understand what is we are pursuing. If we do not define success appropriately, we may see other's success and lose the value of our own success; we may confuse extrinsic value with intrinsic value.

Success and failure are not unlike other objects in the universe: they are guided by and subject to the whims of momentum, physical and otherwise. The more you engage in a behavior, the more frequently that behavior occurs – and more quickly. This momentum creates a sense of success being generative and influencing future success. The same applies to failure; since it is predicated on a series of behaviors, the more you engage in them, the more frequent they become.

The danger lies in seeing the momentum as fate or determinism. You are in charge of changing the momentum, of creating new behavioral tendencies that propagate toward a synergy. Do not allow past mistakes to create a self‐fulfilling prophecy that dominates your path to success.

We are governed by values. These values influence nearly every aspect of our lives. And this influence extends to how we set goals and define success. Values are instilled in us, but we can adopt them as well; they can change.

However, values are not targets.

Success is defined by goals, which are targets. We make decisions in our lives on the basis of our values and they color how we understand and process the world around us. This foundational set of rules help you discover your purpose, which is closely tied to ideas of success.

When we think of success, we often turn to financial metrics. This illustrates the relativity of success very clearly. The amount of money that one thinks of as enough is wildly subjective; so, too, is the idea of success relative to that. Material success does not necessarily offer value, but it does reveal that each individual's idea of it can be assessed along a spectrum.

No matter the form of success, each person will have a different definition, level, and metric by which they experience it. The important thing to understand is that it is your definition of success that matters, not anyone else's.

The Pareto principle is colloquially known as the 80/20 rule. Simply put, it states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is often extended into marketing as 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients. It provides an interesting base for how we understand and measure success.

Thomas Jefferson once attested, “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” This statement is the key to understanding luck and its relationship to success. Simply put, there is no bad or good luck in effect. It is determination and working hard toward a set goal that create a context in which one can flourish. If there were bad luck, it would be a law of nature. However, were it a law of nature, it would not suffer under the weight of chance and probability. And were there no chance, how could there be any kind of luck at all? We all have an idea of being in the right place at the right time as a quick way of achieving success. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the importance of goal setting, planning definition, measurement, and the perseverance to continue forward toward your idea of success.

If you depend on luck as a means of achieving success, you are eliminating the possibility of agency in your pursuit of personal success. How can you influence your success if you are at the whim of mere fickle chance?

This ties in with the difficulty of letting chance guide your thinking. If you believe that opportunities are fated into your path, then you will not follow through on the plan you have set yourself. Unfortunately, many of us believe that things come to those who wait. Nevertheless, it is the interdependency with others that leads to being in the environment where things happen. It is perseverance that creates the situation in which it appears as if manna falls from heaven. Success is about creating, recognizing, and acting on opportunities, not blindly waiting for them to trip into your path.