Rewriting Our Notions of Success

What does success look like? The answer to this question will become, for many, the north star that guides, offers course correction, and motivates one along life’s path. We’re drawn to success and repelled by failure. That’s why, in business school, it’s so important to find a successful person to ‘shadow’. Hopefully, mentored by one who is already a good deal further along the road than you, you’ll find your own inner compass calibrated like theirs, so that you can be powerful like them, or productive like them, or influential, entrepreneurial, prosperous, balanced, wise, or whatever else they happen to be that makes them successful.

But we’re back to that fundamental question, “What does success look like?” because when you look for someone to shadow, you look for someone who embodies those qualities that you have already determined worthy of emulation. And just how is it that you and come to land upon those qualities? The answer to that question is perhaps one of the most important questions of all, an answer that might be found in a story:

We have dear friends who own a farm high in the Austrian Alps, and every year I visit them. This year, my wife being with me, visiting the animals in the barn was a high priority, much higher in fact, than other years. In fact, we exited the car and, much to my disappointment, moved from the 25(f) outside air into the balmy 35(f) air of the barn! While walking towards the barn, I must confess that cookies and coffee sounded far more appealing than visiting the barn. My disappointment turned to disgust when, after some time in the barn, I noticed the smell of uric acid and ammonia. Actually, noticed is an understatement. I became overwhelmed by it, and left the barn, choosing the freezing winds over the strong offending odors.

Standing out in the cold, I pondered why the animals weren’t offended. Did they have no frame of reference to realize what they were missing, to know that a fine potpourri of cloves, cinnamon, and pine oils would revive their lagging spirits like nothing else? I’m a big fan of aromas in case you didn’t know, and so I played with this little mystery for a few moments when suddenly it hit my like a ton of bricks, as I noticed the Christmas lights on the far side of the valley: Jesus was born amidst these smells. Let’s put it another way: the most successful person ever to have lived, the one who single handedly undid a curse hanging over the cosmos, was born, lived, and died in ways run utterly contrary to our prevailing notions of success.

Jesus was born into poverty and never really did find a place to lay his head. He didn’t complain about it; it’s just the way it was. But I don’t see any homeless people today on the covers of magazines, sacred or secular, marked out as world changers. One prevailing vision of success certainly includes material well being. There’s a notion that Christ came in order to endow people with upward mobility, vibrant health, and access to creature comforts and pleasures. If that’s true, then the mentors I’ll choose will look like they’ve fallen off the cover of some magazine; well heeled, attractive, flat abs, and access to lots of cash. If that’s the case, Jesus probably won’t qualify. Maybe he had the six pack abs; I don’t know. But the rest of it? I’m pretty sure he’d be overlooked in a crowd.

Jesus began with 12 followers. His popularity grew until multitudes were chasing him like deadheads. Undaunted, he preached about eating flesh and drinking blood until nearly everyone went away and in the end, when he could have used a few friends, even the 12 founding members abandoned Him. Is this the kind of person you’d put in charge of developing leaders or speaking at motivational seminars? Is this the kind of person who becomes a consultant? Jesus’ resume as a leader probably wouldn’t even land him a book contract, let alone a consistent revenue stream as a leadership development guru. Yet today, we’re somehow convinced that following Jesus makes us super effective leaders, by which of course we mean having the capacity to cast vision, catalyze workers, and move events and people so that vision becomes reality. You think? The leader hanging on a cross whose best man is cursing his name as he trembles in fear before a teenage door maid isn’t the one most people would choose to be their mentor.

Jesus was humble, broken, deeply human, and always crossing boundaries that our evil world has erected to keep reconciliation and healing at bay. But are humility, brokenness and familiarity with the frailties of our humanity goals of today’s upwardly spiritually mobile? We might give lip service to it, but when I get out of the city and sit in my writing cabin, I wonder: What does real success smell like?

If Jesus is our model, success has the smell of brokenness, vulnerability, dependency, confession, and humility. These are the aromas of the barnyard, the carpenter shop, the alley; not some elegent cologne or perfume. Successful people are crying sometimes, because they’re under deep conviction over their sins, or they’re heart is breaking with a desperate desire to see God do something in the life of another, or even because the last thing in the world they want to do is exactly the thing God is asking of them (not exactly following one’s passion would you say?) Successful people are crossing boundaries, and when they do, it means that the well dressed are eating with those in rags, the well sheltered are sleeping with homeless, the rich and poor have touched hearts, and even gay and straight people are listening to each other as if they’re all people loved by God. Of course, those who live that way often pay a price. For some it will even mean the spilling of one’s own blood, the smell of which is never pretty.

The danger enters into our lives though when we come to the point where, like me, we’re so in love with our cultures notions of success that we have a hard time embracing Jesus’ notions. Today for example, I was trying to fix a broken pipe, and I ended pulling a toothbrush matted in old stinky hair out of a broken pipe, along with about a cup and a half of hair. The smell was so bad I nearly threw up. What if I’m the same way when it comes to spiritual aromas? What if I’m so easily offended by rejection that I twist my words and smooth out the rough edges, kind of changing the stench of success into a lovely clove scent so as to avoid rejection? What if I do that?

The reality is that our greatest model for success usually looked nothing at all like the notions of success that govern our culture, even sadly at times, our Christian culture. We need to take great care that Ceasar, and Wall Street, and Las Vegas are not the shaping voices of our definition of success, for when they are, the nationalism, materialism, and hedonism that so thoroughly rob us real success, the kind that will be found among those whose chief aim is simply to love God and love people, come what may. This is success, and I pray that it will be these two values, and the One who embodied them best, that will become our north star in 2008.