Success Without Happiness Is Failure

A Lesson from Bob Newhart

If you want to spend half-an-hour laughing as hard as you’ve ever laughed, check out Bob Newhart’s debut comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. I actually have an autographed copy of the album in the entryway of my house.

But if the album is great, the backstory to the album is absolutely wild. In a story that’s too good to check, Cracked tells us that Newhart’s

“comedy career” began when he’d call a buddy who worked at an ad agency and perform extended prank calls as an airline pilot or the manager of a yeast factory. Another friend heard about Newhart’s funny phone bits and suggested recording them to sell to radio stations. A few stations bought in, and the hilarious recordings ended up in the hands of an executive at Warner Bros. The guy thought Newhart’s phony phone calls would make a funny album and wanted to record them at one of the comic’s club gigs. The problem: Newhart had never performed in front of an audience.

So what you hear on Button-Down Mind is Newhart’s debut performance. But what happened next was even more insane. The album went to #1. Not #1 on the comedy charts, but #1 on the music charts. And a rushed follow up album crafted from entirely new material? That hit #2…right behind Button-Down, which was still at #1.

Newhart had it all. Money? Check. Fame? Check. Prestige? Well, how about this for prestige?

That year at the Grammys, Newhart pulled off a feat that no comedian will ever match again. It was Newhart’s hasty follow-up record, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, that won the award for Best Comedy Performance. But the big shocker was The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart beating out Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte for Album of the Year. At that point, Best New Artist was kind of a given, making Newhart a triple Grammy winner on the night.

By every conventional measure, Newhart was a success. But if you ask me whether Newhart was successful I’d have to say: I have no clue.

For an Effective Egoist, there is only one genuine marker of success—and it is only vaguely correlated to conventional markers of success.

What Is Success?

My dictionary gives two definitions of success:

1. the accomplishment of an aim or purpose

2. the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status

You can think of that those as capturing two conceptions of success: narrow success and conventional success. But an Effective Egoist is primarily concerned with ultimate success: happiness.

I’ve written at length about the meaning of happiness, but informally you can think of it very simply as: enjoying the living of your life.

It is entirely possible to accomplish some narrow aim or purpose and be miserable. It is entirely possible to have all the fame, wealth, and social status the world has to offer and be anxious, depressed, and unfulfilled. Everyone knows this—and yet almost everyone equates success and self-interest with “the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status.”

But for an Effective Egoist, success without happiness is failure.

A Blueprint for Success

Simplicity often hides complexity. Apple’s products are simple to use but that’s because Apple handles all the complexity for you. You don’t need to know electronics or coding to use an iPhone—but Apple sure as hell needs to know that (and a lot more) to produce one.

The challenge of happiness is that the simplicity of enjoying the living of your life depends on meeting a complex array of interconnected needs—and you’re the only one who can meet them. You can’t outsource the work of building a life that you love.

But while nature didn’t supply you with an instruction manual for building a life that you love, morality does. Morality—the right morality—provides you with a blueprint for happiness. Morality tells you the fundamental values and virtues that add up to a flourishing life: from the cardinal values of reason, purpose, and self-esteem to the key virtues of rationality, honesty, integrity, independence, justice, productiveness, and pride.

When you live a moral life, you put yourself on a pro-life path—a path where you move forward without conflict, where all your values fit together into a harmonious whole, where one success propels you to further success, and where the life you’re building adds up to something fulfilling and meaningful.

Money won’t give you that. Money is a means, and if you make it an end then you make work merely a means. But work is the central activity that makes up your life. If you don’t love your work you cannot love the living of your life.

Money is great. It fuels your other values, from health to relationships. A few years ago, I was able to fly to California to surprise a good friend on his fortieth birthday. I will never forget the look on his face when he walked into his house and saw his friend from Michigan standing in his living room. Money made that possible. But it could not have bought me my friend.

As for fame and prestige, their relationship to a life you love living is even more tenuous. At best they are byproducts of life-promoting values. If your goal is to play professional baseball, fame comes as part of the package. If your goal is to direct movies, prestige can be a natural outgrowth of creating great art. But while there is nothing wrong with desiring recognition from people you respect, the desire for praise from the masses is a sickness. It reflects a lack of self-esteem that no amount of applause will remedy.

Morality points the way to true success. If you use your mind to the fullest, if you build your life around a fulfilling productive purpose, if you build a character of steel, then you will be on the path to joy.

But—and here comes the new point—morality alone won’t guarantee you enjoy the living of your life. It’s a necessary ingredient, but not a sufficient one. You need a blueprint to build your dream house, but you can’t live in a blueprint. You need a pro-life morality to know how to thrive, but you need more than a pro-life morality to actually thrive.

Beyond the Blueprint

There are four major aspects of building a life that you love which require knowledge that goes beyond moral knowledge.

1. Value Formation

2. Value Achievement

3. Value Integration

4. Value Enjoyment

Value Formation

Morality tells us to seek pro-life values and it outlines the fundamental values that make up a human life. But we have to form the specific values that will constitute our life.

I talked about value formation at length in How to Be an Earthly Idealist, so I won’t repeat that here. But I’ll just remind you that it crucially involves taking action, reflecting on your experience, and projecting different kinds of futures you could create.

Morality says to build your life around a productive career, for example, but it doesn’t mandate any particular career. I became a writer because, of all the countless activities I engaged in as a child, writing was the one that fascinated and fulfilled me the most. Books held an almost holy place in my mind, the act of writing felt like the fullest expression of me, and I could imagine nothing more exciting than spending my life putting words on the page.

Value Achievement

Even though I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer, that didn’t give me the first clue to how to become a writer. The world doesn’t guarantee that you get to spend your life doing what you want to do. You have to make it happen.

In Effective Egoism (only $5 on Kindle!), I go into detail about how you can achieve the career you want. Here I just want to highlight one foundational aspect: the pursuit of mastery.

One of the main things that holds people back from a career they love is that they’re just not good enough. If you are elite at what you want to do, then it doesn’t quite guarantee you your ideal career, but it comes pretty close.

How do you achieve mastery? Three powerful tools are backwards engineering, practice, and mentors. Backwards engineering means finding models who have achieved what you want to achieve and identifying what made them successful. Practice means doing the demanding work of cultivating those skills. Mentors can supercharge this process through their advice, feedback, and support.

Value Integration

Happiness doesn’t come from achieving a single value, but a whole constellation of pro-life values. Ayn Rand called it a state of “non-contradictory joy,” where the achievement of one value doesn’t undermine your other values.

Unhappiness essentially is a state of conflict, and part of the power of a pro-life morality is that it identifies a constellation of values that can fit together harmoniously. But just because your values can fit together harmoniously doesn’t mean they will.

Everything in your life competes for limited resources—money, energy, and above all time. To integrate your values into a happy life you have to decide their relative importance. You must develop a clearly defined hierarchy of values so that you can resolve conflicts by honoring your most important values.

You can’t do everything you want to do—but you can do what you most want to do. You can build a life that honors your most important values. You just have to know which values are most important, and give to each what it demands.

Value Enjoyment

The other day I was listening to an interview with members of the bands Soundgarden and Nirvana, and both of them spoke about not appreciating the high points of their careers as they were living through them.

That is tragic. But it’s damn common. Knowing how to enjoy your life is itself a skill to be mastered. And often all it takes is adopting the right perspective.

Recently I was stressed over the amount of work on my plate. My eight year old looked at the cork board where I track my projects and said, “Dad, you have thirty-eight project!? That’s a lot!” It was a lot. But it turned out, I didn’t need to be less busy to be more happy—I needed to think about my work differently.

Instead of telling myself, “I have so much to do,” I started telling myself, “I’m so thankful I get to work on so many cool projects.” That one shift in perspective didn’t totally eliminate the stress. But it radically changed my day-to-day experience for the better because my focus was no longer on everything I had to do but on the thrilling things I got to do.

But let’s be clear about one thing. Happiness doesn’t mean that every moment of your life is pleasurable. To enjoy the living of your life is not to enjoy every single moment you live through. I have an amazing life. I have the career of my dreams, the girl of my dreams, two incredible kids. But when my fifteen year old cat got sick a few weeks ago and I thought we might have to put her down, I did not enjoy anything about the experience.

Happiness is climate, not weather. It’s about the overall state and direction of your life. There will always be difficult times. You cannot have profound values and remain joyful when you lose them (or suspect you might lose them). But happiness does make you resilient in the face of pain. It gives you the resources to cope, endure, and eventually flourish again.

The Ultimate Lesson

My favorite Bob Newhart skit has him playing the role of therapist who makes his clients an incredible offer: he charges $5 for the first five minutes…and nothing after that. Because the session won’t go longer than five minutes. It doesn’t need to because his advice will solve any problem.

Your claustrophobia has you afraid of being buried alive in a box? “Stop it!”

Patient: What are you saying?

Therapist: You know, it’s funny. I say two simple words and I cannot tell you the amount of people who say exactly the same thing you’re saying. This is not Yiddish, Katherine. This is English. Stop. It.

Patient: So…I should just…stop it.

Therapist: There you go. I mean, you don’t want to go through life being scared of being buried alive in a box, do you? That’s frightening.

Patient: It is.

Therapist: Then, stop it!

It’s not enough to know what you should do. You need to know how to do it. Effective Egoism gives you both the what of happiness and the essential how. It gives you the fundamental values and virtues you can use to enjoy the living of your life. It gives you the blueprint for ultimate success.

But to achieve ultimate success requires more than that. It requires the lifelong commitment to learning how to value—and to acting to achieve your values.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.