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Imagine if you had a tiny magical tool that could guide you to your success.
Christina Garidi explores success through the ancient Greek concept of Eudaimonia, emphasizing purpose, journey, and values.
Key Takeaways
- Success is more than external achievements; it requires alignment with personal purpose and values.
- Eudaimonia, an ancient Greek concept, defines success as flourishing by living virtuously and balancing light and dark aspects of life.
- Feelings are essential indicators to assess if one is on the right path toward success.
- Redefining success involves embracing purpose, journey, and values rather than just outcomes.
- Community, belonging, and respect are vital components of a fulfilling success model.
Summary
- The traditional definitions of success focusing on money, fame, or status felt empty and unfulfilling to the speaker.
- Success is reframed as a two-step journey: defining one's purpose and progressing toward it.
- Personal loss and reflection led to questioning the cost of career success and the need for change.
- Arianna Huffington's book 'Thrive' inspired hope and the idea of redefining success beyond conventional metrics.
- Values act as a compass guiding individuals toward their true purpose and success.
- Feelings and emotions serve as internal signals to determine if one is on the right path.
- The ancient Greek concept of Eudaimonia, meaning flourishing through virtue and balance, is introduced as a deeper model of success.
- Success involves three elements: purpose, journey, and values, with emphasis on value, belonging, and respect.
- The speaker's personal journey from corporate consultant to purpose coach illustrates the application of the Eudaimonia success model.
- Honoring values and connecting with a supportive community are crucial for meaningful success.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Would you take it?
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Today, I want to gift you a story about how an untranslatable ancient Greek word is your compass to your success.
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When I read the definition of success in the Oxford dictionary,
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it said, it is the attainment of money, fame, or status.
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I felt uneasy, is that it? It could be more, right?
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I always thought I was ambitious and driven, but this definition left me feeling empty and disappointed.
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How would I ever want something so egotistical?
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In my corporate days, career meant career progression, bonuses, promotions, sleep deprivation, stress, and exhaustion.
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Was this the cost of success? I was trying to rationalize it, to understand it.
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I was a business consultant and in the name of efficiency, I was automating people's jobs.
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In other words, I was getting rid of people. Who was I to make such decisions?
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I was trying to understand until a friend asked me a question: Are you proud of what you're doing?
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It was the most shameful moment in my career.
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The truth I needed to admit echoed like a slap on my face.
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I was not proud of what I was doing. I was not proud of who I was becoming. I was unfulfilled. Can you relate?
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So, what is success?
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That question bothered me. After countless hours on Google, all that I could find was videos, articles, and blogs that alienated me even more.
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See, success is a very confusing and frustrating term for me.
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This is why I chose it as my topic today.
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How could I attain it if I did not understand it?
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Why was it so magnetic?
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The second definition from the dictionary was equally puzzling and overwhelming.
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It said, success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
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I was already sleep deprived, panicky, and stressed.
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I had no time to philosophize about my purpose in life.
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All that I knew was that I wanted to make impact and feel good about the work I did.
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I had no energy to start afresh.
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And so, I carried on for a year or so, staggering through something I did not believe in, until I lost my grandmother.
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She left this world and I broke my promise to her.
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I was going to be with her at the end of the year in Japan.
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I did not even make it to her funeral.
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On my honeymoon in Crete, I found time to grieve her departure.
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The tears were for the time I was not going to get back, for who I was becoming.
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The realization that the way I have structured my life was costing me my relationships.
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Was work more important than playing with my granny, Jankenpon, which is rock paper scissors?
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I knew I had to change something, but what?
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As you can imagine, my husband and I, we did not have a very carefree honeymoon with all of this going on.
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One of the days, we were at the spa, and a book was accidentally left in one of the loungers.
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It was Arianna Huffington's Thrive, the third metric to redefining success.
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It did not give me a definition for success,
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nor a model that I could measure my life against.
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But what it did give me was exactly what I needed at the time.
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Hope.
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A ray of light in my darkness and asphyxiation.
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The possibility that it was okay to take care of myself and enjoy work.
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And to do that, I had to re-architect my life.
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This book acted as an invitation for me to redefine success.
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So here I am today, to share with you an alternative model for success.
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So, in my attempt to redefine success, I broke this definition down into two questions.
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Number one, what is your purpose?
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And number two, where are you on your journey to accomplishing it?
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So here I am in Crete, on a honeymoon, and I for the first time realized that success is a two-step journey.
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Purpose and journey.
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So, I shared that aha moment with my husband.
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And he asked me those two questions back.
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And he got silence.
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You see, without the purpose, you cannot start the journey.
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And then he said, what more will another day at your current job give you?
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And he got tears of desperation.
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At that point, I knew I had to resign.
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And in lack of any other options, I decided to go home from the UK to Japan with no plan on what to do next with my life or career.
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And so, I hurried to a destination called home.
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Three months have passed, but triumph did not come.
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Returning home did not equal finding my purpose.
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I was annoyed.
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In fact, I was angry and frustrated, so purpose and journey clearly was not enough.
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I was running out of time, excuses, pressure was high, but I still had no plan.
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And have you heard of the phrase called, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey?
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Reflecting back, I took a shortcut and flew to my destination.
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But I did not go through the journey.
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I cheated, and it did not work.
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This time I was seriously lost.
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I was homeless at home.
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Something was distracting me and I was convinced I had demons in permanent residence in my head.
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And then I re-encountered Homer's epic, The Odyssey.
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It took Odysseus 10 years to return home after the end of the Trojan War.
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Why?
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Even Odysseus struggled with monsters on his homecoming journey to Ithaca.
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So what happens when you're lost and you cannot see your purpose?
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Where airplanes have GPS radars, but how do we humans know whether we're on the right track?
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Values are the compass to our success.
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The important life philosophies that make us who we are.
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Honoring our values allows us to align with our true north, our purpose.
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And as we don't have a physical compass or constellations to guide us on the right path,
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we humans are designed to know whether we're on the right track in one and only way.
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We are equipped with feelings and emotions.
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Our heart more than our intellect knows and signals whether we're on the right track.
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So how did Odysseus feel in order to reach Ithaca?
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Hmm, feelings.
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I was looking for a feeling until it landed on me.
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The feeling that changed my life.
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The feeling that unlocked what success meant for me.
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The untranslatable ancient Greek word that is perhaps older than democracy itself, Eudaimonia.
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I was right in there, in that black hole, after quitting my job and embarking on an unsupervised purpose-seeking journey to redefine success.
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I had to fight with my worst demons: anger, loneliness, and shame.
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Why me? What was wrong with me? Why I couldn't figure it out?
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And amongst all this, I discovered a sense of wild inner joy, despite external adversity.
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My zen despite the chaos.
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My compass to success.
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Eudaimonia doesn't have a perfect translation.
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And it is often confused with happiness.
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Aristotle thought that the constant expectation of happiness is unreasonable.
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Eudaimonia means keeping a good terms with our demons, our spirits.
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Like Yin and Yang in oriental philosophy, our light is balanced by our dark side.
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To paraphrase Aristotle, human success is to flourish by actively behaving with virtue.
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In other words, our values.
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So now I knew that success has three instead of two steps.
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Purpose, journey, and values.
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Job done, right?
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Uh-uh.
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Back into the UK, I started my business.
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My purpose is to democratize human flourishing.
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In the last four years, I had the honor to spend time with hundreds of people who entrusted me on their purpose-seeking journey.
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I heard their stories firsthand and there was a meaningful pattern.
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This gives me the courage to stand in front of you today and share what I now call the Eudaimonia success model.
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It has three elements.
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Value, belonging, and respect.
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Looking back, my dots eventually connected.
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I was a business consultant getting rid of people.
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Fixing my bad karma by helping people with their CVs.
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After completing my coaching course, I was getting challenged out of my depth with clients who wanted to find their purpose.
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When I did not have my mess sorted out yet.
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Ironic, right?
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My work had meaning and impact by helping people decode their purpose.
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Number two.
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When I set up my business, I was attracting the wrong collaborators.
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Why?
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I had compromised my values.
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Now, trust, integrity, and respect are my mistaken compass.
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Honoring my values allows me to connect with a community of people that inspire me and challenge me.
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They are my chosen home.
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I feel I belong.
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Next, something totally unexpected happened.
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The more I focused on fulfilling my purpose, the more my wisdom was getting sought by people to influence their decisions in their lives.
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So, when I was about to debunk the traditional metrics of success, money, fame, and status,
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I noticed that they sounded like the dark side of success.
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So, in true Eudaimonia fashion, let's dance with these demons for a moment.
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Money is self-explanatory.
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Fame is our popularity or reputation.
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Status is the rank position one has in an organization or community.
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The higher the status, the more decision-making power they have, and this is normally associated with our leaders.
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So, putting both models side by side, to my surprise, they were the two sides of the same coin.
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When we know our purpose, we can add value.
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The higher the value, the bigger the reward.
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And we can measure value by the number of people who benefit through our work.
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And money just helps us put worth to the impact we make.
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And knowing who we are for others creates belonging in the community we serve.
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We can measure belonging by tapping into our sense of feeling at home.
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The clearer the purpose, the more others recognize us and gravitate towards us.
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The third one, honoring our values allows us to make integral decisions.
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Others respect us.
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And this is the art basically of influencing.
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So as you can see, both models are in the same continuum.
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For the three metrics of wealth, recognition, and influence.
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They are simply described from a different point of view.
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Now if you have to keep something, then think of Eudaimonia as the cause of success.
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And the traditional model as the effect of it.
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And if we focus just on the effect and we forget the cause of success,
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then we end up alienating ourselves.
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And this is exactly what happened to me early on in my career.
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Now finally, Victor Frankl's words made sense.
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Success cannot be pursued, it must ensue.
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Like Odysseus, it took me 10 years to understand that my past career made sense.
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My long journey did not go to waste.
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These 10 years were now a gift.
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Today, on my birthday, I returned to Crete where it all started with a book.
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My intention was to share with you an alternative and hopefully more meaningful perspective to success.
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Whatever success means for you, you know it will mean a short dance with your demons.
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Now you know how an untranslatable ancient Greek word is the compass to your success.
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I wish you your journey to success is a long one, full of Eudaimonia.
Topics:successEudaimoniapurposevaluespersonal growthAristotleself-fulfillmentcareer changeTEDxChristina Garidi
