The Hard Truth About Success That Andre Agassi Knew All Along
Success won’t make you happy. Happiness will make you successful.
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There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being ambitious and pursuing traditional forms of success such as money, power, and recognition. But counterintuitively, research in positive psychology reveals that happiness drives success, not the other way around. Start with happiness. Define it. Then ask: What does success mean for me?
Your goals—and your life—will change.
For most of my professional life, my goal was to advance my career. It was all I thought about. Aside from family, which has always been my priority, deep questions about long-term goals and happiness were left in a mental fog as everything else was subsumed by the aim of professional advancement.
Over the last few years, I’ve achieved major goals. The nature and scope of my professional responsibilities are beyond my expectations, and some of that fog (or goal blindness) is starting to clear.
Now that I’ve arrived at this place, for the first time, I’ve begun to wonder if I’m setting goals that will increase my happiness. I’ve never tried to answer that question before. I’ve used my instinct, as you do when you walk in the fog. Looking back, I wouldn’t change any big decisions—moving from Canada to the U.S. to work at State Street in Boston for ten years, to PIMCO in Newport Beach for five years, and lastly, to T. Rowe Price in Maryland. But I’ve gone through my fair share of rough patches as a leader and as an individual contributor.
Occasionally, I’d have benefited from a long-term perspective on the most basic question: Am I pursuing the right goals?
To set better long-term goals, you must ask the right questions, some of which aren’t typically discussed in the leadership context. You must change how you think about goals and, ultimately, success.
Reversing the Happiness Equation
In his book Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, the world-renowned academic psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asserts:
“Everything we do is ultimately aimed at experiencing happiness. We don't really want wealth, or health, or fame as such—we want these things because we hope that they will make us happy.”
When we set goals for ourselves, or an organization, we define “success.”
Most people think that success brings happiness. Of course, it’s not that simple.
Some successful people are unhappy. In his excellent memoir titled Open, Andre Agassi reveals that even when he was at the top of his game, ranked as the best tennis player in the world, he was miserable. “A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad. Not even close,” he explains. For most of his career, starting at a very young age, he kept thinking, “I hate tennis.”
In the corporate world, there are plenty of successful organizations with miserable employees. Anyone who’s worked on Wall Street knows what I’m talking about. Recently, a friend commented that at his company (a world-leading money management firm), despite all the Ferraris in the parking lot, he had “never seen so many miserable rich people.”
Some people thrive in combative, in-your-face environments. The type of people who love the smell of napalm in the morning. But my friend explained that even when they were making lots of money for clients and winning new mandates, the knives were always out at his firm. Salespeople were at each other’s throats to take credit for new business wins, and portfolio managers were hoarding research and money-making trade ideas.
Happiness = Success
To be clear, these are merely counterexamples, perhaps exceptions, to the Success = Happiness equation. There’s nothing wrong with being successful! It must be fantastic to become an elite tennis player. I’m sure most of them are quite happy. I suspect many who focus on intrinsic goals are enjoying their pro career more than Agassi did. And I believe in capitalism, especially compared with other failed models. Companies should maximize profits for shareholders as long as they also care for employees, clients, and the environment.
My point is that we should tighten the links between goals and happiness. To do so, we need to reverse the success = happiness equation.
Shawn Anchor, a leading expert on positive psychology and author of The Happiness Advantage, argues that happiness leads to success, not the other way around!
Before you set goals, ask yourself:
What’s your definition of happiness?
From that definition, what would success look like?
Of course, there can be an issue with these larger, more intimate questions in the context of leadership training and development. I’ll address them in the next newsletter with further exploration of happiness and its different dimensions.
For now, contemplate the two questions above. Find a quiet spot or go for a walk. With happiness defined, you can identify what success and, more crucially, fulfillment looks for you. Remember what actor Jim Carrey said:
“I wish everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
I hope this was helpful. Please leave me a comment. I look forward to your thoughts.
Seb
When he decided to write a book on leadership and self-improvement, Sébastien Page was rejected by over 200 literary agents.
He was asked, “Why would a finance expert write about leadership?” He was told to stay in his lane.
Sébastien has more than two decades of leadership experience. As an author, he believes breakthroughs often happen when experts venture outside their field. That is why, in "The Psychology of Leadership," he went beyond finance and economics to study research in psychology.
He is currently Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in assets under management.
Sébastien won research paper awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022 and the Financial Analysts Journal in 2010 and 2014. In addition to The Psychology of Leadership, he is the author of Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation (McGraw Hill, 2020) and the coauthor of Factor Investing and Asset Allocation (CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2016).
Sébastien is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group). He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.