Success is often the desire and the goal. If you are successful, that's usually viewed as having achieved that goal and deserving of praise. A successful person is the ultimate role model. And someone who managed to be successful long-term and in different disciplines inspires lots of people to follow their dreams too.

But teaching other people how to be successful in general is one of the most abstract jobs that mostly boils down to "do what I did and trust that it works out for you as well". Which feels more like promoting a lottery. People who don't understand what the price of long-term success is, try to second-guess their lucky moment and attribute it to what they consider hard work that they've done.

Of course luck is inherent to success, for example you have to meet the right people to learn from or to get critical help from. But you can't be lucky all the time, failure is in turn inherent to luck. And failure absolutely does not guarantee success. If you are persistently doing things wrong, no amount of failure and hard work will help you. The only experience you gain that way is negative, and the only thing you start dreaming about is to stop pushing this metaphorical train with your bare hands. But personal beliefs may still demand that you continue.

If luck and hard work can't make you successful even if you combine them, then what can?

The answer is not only counter intuitive, but also anticlimactic. Nothing.

Let go of the goal because it's just a dream. Let go of the role models that absolutize any goals. All goals are inherently flawed:

That's way more luck than any amount of hard work can compensate for. And how do you make yourself lucky enough to succeed in anything at all?

Some people try to solve that by becoming more religious. However that's one of the most criticized aspects of religion in general: you can't use it like a magic button that spawns a deus ex machina that solves the puzzle for you. You can't use religion as a substitute for something you lack, because the way you practice that religion will just inherit your weaknesses. You'll be either making shortcuts for yourself where your religion tells you not to, or you'll get overzealous in things your religion tells you to only apply carefully, with balance.

The solution is to give up.

That is really one anticlimactic advice, isn't it? It's so bafflingly underwhelming that no motivational speaker will ever teach you that. In fact, lots of successful people teach you the exact opposite - "never give up"! Yet if we look at people on Earth in their entirety, it doesn't really look like the "never give up" lesson is working for the majority of them. Sure they happen to reach some of their goals just by pushing through, and in other cases they become so desperate that they may indeed stop giving up, and they manage to achieve something valuable. But how sustainable is all that?

Nobody knows, that's why we are so attracted to motivational coaches! They give us some hope for a while, and it may even help... for a while. And then we're all back to the mental state we tried to escape by becoming successful.

The "never give up" mantra is so associated with success that everyone is now terrified of giving up. People are so obsessed with constantly winning that they've unlearned how to lose. Clinging to our current goals forever is so all-encompassing that we've become unable to ever let go. We think that high performance is so meaningful that we stop giving ourselves time to recharge. And if we underperform as a result of long-term overworking, we think it's a bad thing to ever fail at it.

Failure becomes our hell, because of how much we fear it. We go out of our way to dodge it, even if that means never starting the thing we don't want to fail at. And even if all of that is still acceptable (thought other people hate it when we do it), the one completely unacceptable thing that no one is ever cheered for is giving up. Giving up is considered the absolute fundamental failure that can't be healed or helped.

And yes, as a result of that paranoia, nobody properly learns how to do it, with minimal damage.

Start giving up on goals, to finally start learning how to give up. It's the most humbling experience, if you don't hate yourself for it too much. At first the way you give up will look to you and others as something poor and bad, but with some experience you'll learn to consciously retract. And with enough controlled retraction experience you'll be able to see it quicker when the goal is worth giving up on before it's too late. In the end, you'll be able to completely fail without losing face (too much).

Only after you've learned how to properly fail, lose, retract, and give up, you can find something that's truly your thing. Why? Because no matter how many times you lose and fail at it, you still like it. It's finally something which you don't even mind failing at. No big deal, let's dust down and get right back to it, because the process itself is so much fun! Falling finally feels like a natural part of the fun itself!

Your thing is something you enjoy the process of, no matter what. It's so interesting that you don't want to give up. Now of course there will be really hard problems too, even dramatically bad outcomes. But now you know how to give up, so you just retract and switch to something else. And the best part is, if something is truly for you, it survives your mental bankruptcy! You gave up on it, but it didn't give up on you!

Giving up the right way gives you room to rest and recharge without asking questions, you're completely free of responsibilities, which makes it possible to return stronger than before, on a completely new level.

That is long-term success.

There's a saying that the best victory is having conquered yourself (by Plato). And as always, everyone is only seeing the shiny enjoyable (infantile) part of it. Everyone wants to be that winner. What happy-motivators don't really highlight is the other side of this coin: if you've defeated yourself... then you've also lost to yourself.

This is how burnout works. You've invested all you've had and gained into an achievement, and you've defeated the parts of you that got in the way. But not only do they never go away, they're as legitimate part of you as your own ego is. Your id didn't enjoy the things you had to do to succeed, so your forced yourself to do them regardless. Which did pay off short or long term, but it also has its cost. You can't be truly happy doing it. Maybe only for a little bit after it. But forcing yourself to do "the right thing" is not natural, and it always eventually fails miserably. Often ends with a depression.

If you are depressed, your heart is trying to explain to you that it needs a deep rest from all the goals and methods that you've been rigorously forcing upon yourself. Because forcing people doesn't work.

Success can only be long-term if it's just an irrelevant side-effect of your enjoyable work. But wait, if you only do the things you enjoy, don't you become undisciplined and can't ever accomplish anything at all? That is also true, this is the opposite extreme of overworking. The balance is as always in the middle: find meaning and joy in things you "have" to do by duty. Don't force their pain upon yourself, make them less painful! Of course you need to apply creative thinking to finding that balance: it needs to be good enough for the duty and also enjoyable enough for sustainability. Yes, having experienced pain makes you stronger and smarter. But only if you can still learn from it!

So in the end this is the formula: long-term success is only possible if you don't care about it while doing something you love for the sake of becoming a better person through it.