The Most Successful Person I Know

I have recorded audio of this post which I haven’t done for the last two. I am not sure if people like the recordings or if I am just living out my own podcast dreams. Let me know in the comments if should keep recording audio or if I should just stick to the writing. Thank you.

I first met Michael in 2008 in Argentina. He had travelled to Buenos Aires for a wedding, decided he liked it and didn’t go home. When we first met, he was teaching English to corporate clients and a few days a week he would coach a local cricket team. When the joys of teaching English to Argentine businessmen wore thin, he secured a job that I had never heard of then and have not heard of since. He was employed by a US dating website to chat on behalf of men with the potential female matches that the algorithm threw up. He had to deliver the digital small talk until a first date was set and then he handed over to the real person. In his spare time, not that he had much, he studied a Masters in Sports Management by distance education at an Australian University.

When he grew tired of Argentina he moved back to Australia. He then found a job with the Australian government and was posted to Fiji to deliver sports programs there. Outside of office hours, he took a singing course, culminating in a rousing live performance of Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People.

When the contract in Fiji finished he moved back to Australia and set up a business teaching BMX classes to young people in Sydney. He then landed a job at Macquarie University in Sydney, managing a program that sent the University’s students on short term exchange programs around the world. When the university offered him a redundancy package, he took it and embarked on a year of experimentation and learning. He enrolled in a creative writing course. He took a course in Pasifika language pronunciation. He worked for a while as an Uber driver. He completed a course in voice acting. When he wasn’t doing a course, he was volunteering at NRL Tonga or writing grant applications for his local cricket club. Michael is the most successful person I know.

At the time my father passed away, I didn’t feel very successful by any definition of the word. I felt like a failure. I had battled dad on many fronts over the years, stubbornly stuck to my own ways, going against his wishes at every opportunity. As I stood at his graveside with no house, no job, no prospects, I wondered if all that resistance had been worth it.

I was comforted somewhat by the fact that I don’t think dad’s measure of success would have fulfilled me much either. He had always insisted that my brother and I complete our welding certificates. I can still hear him saying, ‘you’ll never be unemployed if you can weld.’ We chose to ignore that probably good advice and go to university, where my brother studied Chinese Philosophy and Religion and I studied Spanish and Political Science. It was a betrayal I don’t think dad ever got over.

I never gave welding a go, and I’ll never know if I could have been one of the truly great welders. But I did give conformity a go, I did set off down the path of safety and security. When I started working in government a few years ago, considered by many as the one job you can never be fired from, the plan was to work towards obtaining the car and the house and the money and the status. But as the savings account slowly increased in size, I didn’t feel a commensurate increase in happiness. What I felt was more and more miserable until I reached the point where I would wake in the morning feeling like I had a hole in my chest.

Last month Michael purchased his first house in Sydney where he lives with his partner and toddler. He now works two days a week at the Australia Post collection centre, coaches a high school cricket team four days a week and in the time that he has left, he works on his own business, helping sports clubs apply for government grants. He has stopped trying to find work in Sports Management and is happy with the composition of his working life. He has flexibility, is not beholden to any one employer and can raise or lower his working hours as needed. Michael has built a working life that works for him and along the way he has pursued paths, not for monetary gain or material wealth, but because they satisfied a curiosity, satisfied a need to learn, because they fulfilled a secret obligation to himself.

Thinking about Michael’s life has helped me to reassess what success is. There is no success in terms of an end point, or achievement or the accumulation of objects. And not having a house or a car or status is not failure. Failure is living life in a way that leaves you with an emptiness inside your chest when you wake in the morning.  I failed only when I persisted in a job that I knew was not right for me, unwilling to give up the material benefits. That persistence made me sick.

If the pursuit of money and status and promotion leaves you feeling hollow, then money and status and promotion will never fill that hole. The cause cannot be the solution. None of this is to say I have found the path of peace and enlightenment. Far from it. I still worry. I worry about money. But money trouble is easy to fix. With money. What I worried about before was not so easily resolved.

Nor have I renounced the material pleasures of this world. One day I want to own my own home. I want a car that starts every time I turn the ignition. I even want a yacht. And not a small one but one of the big ones that you see in the Mediterranean, the ones that come with a helicopter. But I am also aware that owning the yacht or the house or the car is just a question of money and has absolutely nothing to do with success. Success is keeping yourself whole. Success is fulfilling that secret obligation to yourself.

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