Want to know how to leverage culture to do the successful business?
Then butternomics at the podcast for you.
I'm your host Brandon Butler, founder and CEO of ButterAte Hill.
And on Butternomics we go deep with today's most influential entrepreneurs, innovators, and business leaders to peel back the layers on how they use culture as a driving force in their business.
Butternomics will give you what you need to take your game to the next level.
Listen to Butternomics on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Welcome to Criminalia.
I'm Maria Tramerke. And I'm Holly Frye.
Together we invite you into the dark corridors of history and true crime.
For each season we explore a new theme, from Poisoners to Stockers art thieves to Snake Oil Salesmen.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails, inspired by each story.
And to Criminalia on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For 10 years I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history.
We're all facing 20 years now, like it's just.
The lead singer tried to pull off an English accent and they went on the road to the zombies.
These guys are not going to get away with it.
It's a zombie hit, too popular.
Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone.
It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished.
A truck and two people just don't disappear.
The FBI called it Murder for Higher, but which victim was the intended target and why?
Listen to There and Gone, Sal Street, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.
I hope you've all been well that something I don't know, special or joyous has happened in your life recently and that you are prepared and ready to get into this particularly philosophical episode or topic today.
We're talking about success, specifically of course success in our 20s and whether it's time for us as a generation, as a society, to rethink what it truly means to be a successful individual and why it might be time to move past some of the traditional and limiting ways of thinking about achievement and accolades until an extent happiness.
How can we truly be successful in our 20s without getting bogged down in comparison?
What others think of us doing it for other people, feeling like we have something to prove what is actually truly worthwhile to pursue and to care about in this decade.
This has been one of my brain's favorite go-to topics to overthink about in the last few weeks, last few months as well because quite frankly I've been feeling very overwhelmed as someone still in my 20s by the direction of my career and by the direction of my career I mean to a large extent.
This podcast and I'm going to break the 4th wall for a second and just say you know I absolutely love doing the show, it is so purposeful to me, it aligns with who I am, it aligns with what I believe deeply about the human spirit and about the power of psychology and the power of information to heal.
But I do miss the time in my life when I was only doing it out of pure passion and love.
The podcast is now my full time job and so there are a lot of additional elements to think about, you know, how do I make money from this, am I getting enough listens and biggest of all how can I be successful and what does that success mean, does it mean publicity, does it mean recognition or does it actually mean having real impact and zooming out a little bit, touching
some grass, having a bit of perspective and actually just separating myself from my job and being a happy person.
Is that what actually makes you a successful individual, having a deep and meaningful connection to what you're doing, yes, but also a connection to who you are, what you actually enjoy in life and who you are beyond your career, beyond your work, beyond what other people may be saying, I think I've been focusing on the wrong things and it's rubbed me a little bit
of joy and, you know, as a group as 20-somethings, we have become very consumed with being impressive and is that constant pursuit of success actually making us less happy and less centered as a generation because we are too fixated on what our life looks like versus what our life contains as you can probably tell there has been a real mental tug of war for me.
And last week, and I booked this beautiful Airbnb in the mountains just to get away, did some soul searching, did some digging and came to some conclusions about what it means to, I don't know, how the achievements, how the accolades be happy with your life, perhaps beyond the frills and the excess of what we think a success looks like.
So I'm very excited for this episode.
If you like more about chatty, deep thinker style topics that view into more of the extra central philosophical conversations, obviously still with a whole theater of psychology, you are going to love this topic.
So without further ado, let's get into how we can be truly successful in our 20s and what success actually means at its core.
Being successful feels really important for a lot of us during this decade.
It's definitely up there, I think, with some of our bigger anxieties about the future.
And how do I set up my life during this chapter to be impressive and to be secure later on?
I think our fixation on this obviously comes from a place of wanting certainty, right?
If I'm successful in my turnies, I'll probably be successful in my 30s and beyond, which means I won't have to worry about money.
I won't have to worry about having something to do.
I won't have to worry about feeling behind.
So that self preservation is one element of it.
But I also think that our excessive fascination and fixation with success also comes from a place of ego wanting to feel important in the world.
And that sense of importance is impacted by what society tells us is valuable and what makes someone, again, an important person.
Someone to look to, someone to feel proud of, or maybe even envious of, in a sense.
Spoiler alert, the people who we typically see as successful, you know, it's just normally not that they are a kind person or that they have a lot of good memories.
It's not that they are led by purpose or that they're acting small or that they're just a nice happy person.
It's typically a lot more materialistic and grander than that.
What makes someone important and therefore successful comes down to being the best at something, having a lot of money, getting a lot of attention or recognition, having something to your name.
I'm going to ask you to picture a successful person for a second.
I'm guessing your mind probably went to someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or a celebrity like Taylor Swift or Beyonce.
That is not an accident.
The image of success that we have is again very limited, very exaggerated, but also very individualistic and closely aligned with fame.
You know, what can you achieve, what have you done, what level of attention do you receive for your hard work, what kind of money have you made?
Maybe this also comes down to celebrity worship as well.
If you want an amazing podcast specifically on this topic, you need to listen to Amanda Montell's podcast magical overthinkers, where she talks about this and she talks about how our collective obsession with celebrities and the parasocial relationship that we have with them has collectively made us feel more compelled or attracted by the idea of fame and perhaps
less satisfied with an ordinary life.
And you want to know something fascinating.
A study run in 2022 showed that people who are more drawn into celebrity worship often do report feeling less satisfied with what they've accomplished.
And they do also believe that they would be happier if they were more like the celebrities that they see or that they were famous.
So again, our perception of what makes someone successful is very exclusive and very narrow and very much reserved for the best of the best.
Something that unfortunately we can't all be, I think this is also elevated by our, you know, this new wave, I guess, of online success and media success and social media success, where anyone can become recognizable or popular by posting from their bedroom.
And so this idea that we could all be notable, that we could all be popular, that we could all have this kind of online, huge life is a lot more available to us and a lot of us are leaning into that self promotion.
Even if you are kind of detached from social media and how social media hype is really feeding into our obsession with success, if you're in the corporate world, you're like equivalent to LinkedIn, there is a cultural shift even on that platform towards self promotion.
Like what are my successes?
What is my worth if someone else cannot see it, if someone else cannot judge me by it, if someone else is not impressed when looking externally for that confirmation that what we're doing is correct, that we're enough, that we're pushing ourselves enough, rather than trusting our compass for A, what we actually care about, B, what we actually want to be doing and C,
whether we're enjoying ourselves.
When success becomes so individually focused, it really does put a lot of pressure on us to be working harder and to be elevating ourselves in comparison to others because success starts to feel very competitive, very glamorous, rather than collaborative and simple.
It's not about how happy you are, it's not about what you do for your community, it's not about how you get back and what the world needs, but how do you make yourself feel impressive in this space?
Well let me just say this is not a criticism, I definitely buy into this all the time that success equals self promotion and success equals image, but I also think that that is contributing to a lot of mental and emotional consequences for this group of people, this age group.
Firstly, when we're not meeting the criteria for a conventionally successful life or you don't feel like it's successful, 20 something, it really makes us feel quite behind and therefore like a failure because we've been taught not to value ourselves as a person, but to value yourself based on output and what you can produce and how talented or impressive you
are and a unique kind of anxiety follows on from that, right?
Known as milestone anxiety.
We have a whole episode on this from a few years ago, but for a refresher, milestone anxiety is a relatively new concept within the psychology space where we tend to experience a certain dread panic that a we are not where we want to be in life and b we're not where others are in their lives.
There was a poll done on this very subject actually earlier this year and it asked around 2,000 adults in the UK whether they were where they wanted to be in life or meeting what they saw as success milestones around 80% of them said no and as a follow up, they said that they felt a huge sense of pressure to be further ahead and achieving more than they had at this stage.
If only 20% of people in their 20s or in early adulthood feel like they are at a point where they can say that they are proud and comfortable in what they've achieved that they are a good person and an impressive person, maybe our notions of what makes for a successful life are incorrect because it should not be excluding that many people nearly no one is feeling like
they measure up, which is probably a good reminder that if you are also feeling that way, you're actually part of the majority, our limited view of success, that individualistic, very glamorous, heightened, exaggerated, grand, public idea of success is not one that most people can achieve but it leaves most people feeling miserable that they can't.
Now if you are someone who is an overachiever, a perfectionist, perhaps you grew up being labeled as a golden or a gifted child, a straight-a student, you're probably going to be more influenced by the pressure to be successful in your 20s than most.
A large facet of your identity if you do see yourself as one of those people is most likely derived from performing above the standard, from being admired or praised for your hard work, being able to push yourself harder than anyone else.
A lot of individuals who grew up as overachievers find that the only way they can now tell if they're doing something that is valuable or if they're even happy with what they're doing is through external reinforcement because our internal system for judging whether something is worthwhile, whether we actually care about something is broken.
We are so used to being praised, recognized, told we're good and that is the fuel, that is the motivation to keep going with something.
When we no longer have that when we get into our mid, our late 20s, we've kind of exited like the education system, we're kind of more responsible for our daily lives and our daily work without having someone telling us what to do, praising what we do.
It can actually lead to a very broken sense of self.
I'm no longer the best, I'm no longer good, I'm no longer achieving things within a certain structure the way that I always have.
That can mean that we start to doubt our career choices, we feel like because we're not getting immediate feedback on things that were failure, that we're not doing well and we struggle to take self-motivated risks, because whether you're starting a new business, maybe you are pursuing social media, putting everything into a passion project, there will be times
when you just have to follow your gut and you have to just believe in your goals without anyone encouraging you.
But when we have this huge fixation of success, but we also really crave external validation for everything that we're doing, we're not always going to get that.
And so our extrinsic motivation system becomes broken, we feel like if we're not constantly being told that, yep, that's good, yep, you're doing really, really well, what are we even doing?
Who even are we without that praise?
That's the sickness really and as we get older it can be hard to shake that productivity, success, driven instinct.
Because again, that's what we relied upon for most of our lives to bring us confidence, bring us self-esteem, self-worth and a purpose.
So if you want some further reading on this, an article that I could not recommend enough, it was written by this publication called The School of Life and it's titled The Secret Sorrow of Overachievers and it talks about how as overachievers, childhood overachievers, teenage overachievers age, they find it very difficult to appreciate their wins in life.
They talk about how our hunger for stereotypical success feeds the burnout cycle, it feeds our imposter syndrome and of course the external validation dependency.
And also and this is crucial, it also creates an inability to ever enjoy the moments when we do feel like we've reached our goals.
It's never enough. You know, the author kind of puts forward this proposition of like, and I don't even think this is just for overachievers but can any of us taste success once and not get addicted?
Is this not such something that we all crave to be seen and acknowledged as being good?
Let me introduce you to this concept called Gold Metal Syndrome because when we talk about is success ever enough, this comes into it a lot.
So obviously the Olympics has just finished and we've seen that a lot of people win gold medals, athletes who work, their entire lives, sometimes for less than 10 seconds.
And obviously losing is awful, it sucks, you don't want to go to the Olympics and lose.
But even for the people who win, they face this psychological phenomenon where upon getting everything that they ever wanted, upon being at the top of the podium, the intellectual top of the podium, they are deeply, deeply unhappy.
And what's actually happening here is something called the hedonic treadmill.
We tend to think that success, that being the best, that being impressive, that be, you know, better than everyone else or doing something really, really cool that people think is really, really cool is going to make us really happy and to an extent it does.
But also after we achieve these huge things, these huge milestones, we tend to return to a pretty stable level of happiness.
The myth that people get really hurt by is that being successful is somehow going to transform your life, transform your emotional state and that you will never be miserable again.
But actually a lot of successful people in the world are gravely unhappy, many successful professionals struggle to enjoy their accomplishments because it becomes their entire life because they really elevate how it's going to feel to reach the finish line.
And when they get there, it's actually quite miserable because they often neglect a lot of other parts of their life and they realize that being impressive and it is really not what life is all about.
There was a study done by UCLA a couple years back and it found that about 72% of successful entrepreneurs, 72% I just want you to remember that number, they suffer from at least one mental health concern.
A lot of them actually have increased rates of depression.
You know, I think, I don't know what the number is now.
I think it's one in three or maybe one in three people will have some kind of mental health concern in their life.
That's around 33%, 72% of people who are really in this like success, obsessive success driven world feel that more intensely.
And CEOs, the same studies that CEOs, some of the most successful people in the world, may be depressed at more than double the rate of the public at large.
And here is my main point.
And here is why I think we need to rethink this concept.
Success is a very shallow thing to base your life meaning on.
And when we are so focused on achieving some goal or having this external image of being the person that has it all or being disciplined, often you miss out on doing things for the sake of just enjoying them or doing things, you know, pursuing a career, a life path, because that's what you feel called towards because that's what you actually care about.
Here's the other aspect of this.
And I know this is going to contradict a lot of what I've said, but, you know, most of the most successful people in the world are actually those who started out for themselves, who did it from a place of pure enjoyment, not for accolades, not for wealth, not for recognition, but because being good at something requires being committed to it from a place of deep personal
value, enjoyment, pleasure and care.
And just actually feeling that even if no one else could see what you were doing, you would still be doing it.
And here's why that's often the case and why I think that really undermines our initial perception of success.
We think that the end goal is the thing that will motivate us all along.
Actually it's the process.
And this first concept I want to talk about is called learned industriousness.
And it refers to a phenomena whereby people who are very successful, who succeed in businesses, who succeed in sports, in music, they are the people who fell in love with the process and the act of doing rather than the outcome.
This is backed up by another concept, another idea called flow.
Now we talk about the flow state a lot, but in case you haven't heard of it before, you haven't called it in a past episode.
Flow is basically a heightened state of consciousness.
And you're doing something that you equally love, that equally challenges you, excites you.
And it basically puts you in the zone and you feel fulfilled afterwards.
Your flow state is often what indicates your calling, right?
Because you could sit there and do this thing for hours, not get bored, not get tired, feel fulfilled, feel not the opposite of exhausted, feel exhilarated.
Now flow is not the concept I'm talking about.
What I want to talk about is how they discovered flow.
And if you listen to the TED Talk given back in 2008 by the creator of this concept, Professor Mahali Sinsamahali, he interviewed Ballerinas, CEOs, chess players, elite cyclists, people who are incredibly, incredibly talented and good at what they do.
And what he found was that the one thing they had in common was that again, these people just really loved what they were doing and they weren't doing it for the acknowledgement.
They weren't doing it for image, for publicity, for sponsors, for money.
They were doing it because this is the thing that lit their fire.
True success comes down to feeling purposeful, feeling aligned with a mission, feeling aligned with a value of some sort and genuinely just enjoying what you're doing, like actually sinking your teeth into life into what you really love and what really like sets you alive and just doing it regardless of what other people are thinking.
And I think that that is the huge switch that we need to make.
The huge understanding that we need to switch from thinking about success is something that is done for others and something that is praised by others, something that has an image to it.
Instead, think about success as something that only you would care about, that only you truly know the meaning of and truly love.
So I want to say this, you know, if you're feeling behind, if you don't feel like you're taking a life path that is expected of you or that you're not pursuing success in a traditional way, if your dreams aren't going to make you famous, aren't going to give you headlines, aren't going to, you know, I don't know, aren't going to put you on like a public stage.
You're probably actually doing what's right and you aren't missing out.
In fact, I think you're closer to what true success looks like for most of us, which is actually joy and energy and love and just value and passion.
I really want to talk about how we can actually find more of that and how we can truly be successful in our 20s with that more evolved understanding.
So let's take a short break.
Let me grab a glass of water.
Let me catch my breath and we'll be back shortly.
I'm Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast where I talk to some of the biggest athletes, musicians, actors in the world.
We go beyond the headlines and the sound bites that have real conversations about real life, death, love and everything in between.
This life right here is just fine in myself, just just relaxation.
It's not feeling stressed.
This is not feeling pressed.
This is what I'm most proud of.
I'm proud of Mary because I've been through hell and some horrible things that feeling that I had in adequacy is gone.
You're going to die being you so you got to constantly work on who you are to make sure that the star is aligned correctly.
Life ain't easy and it's getting harder and harder.
So if you have a story to tell, if you come through some trials which you need to share it because you're going to inspire someone, you're going to give somebody the motivation to not give up, to not quit.
Listen to Angie Martinez, IRL on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Summer. And on NPR's Planet Money Podcast, that means it is time to grab your notebooks, enter headphones and tune into the economics crash course for your ears.
Planet Money Summer School is covering the economic history of the world from the birth of money to the industrial revolution to modern trade policy.
We've got the lessons to keep you sounding smart at the beach with help from real economic historians.
We'll see you Wednesday until Labor Day.
Listen to Planet Money from NPR on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Guess what, Mango? What's that will?
So I Heart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part Time Genius.
I know, that's why I spent my whole week composing a high cougar of the occasion.
It's about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years and it's called Earthquake House.
Mango, I'm going to cut you off right there.
Why don't we just tell people about our show instead?
Yeah, that's a better idea.
So every week on Part Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world's most important questions.
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
Is William Shatner's best acting work in Esperanto?
Also what happened to Esperanto?
Plus we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food, how do dollar stores stay in business, and of course is there an illuminati of cheese?
There absolutely is and we are risking our lives by talking about it.
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history, and really bad jokes, make your brains happy.
