Success vs happiness, and life goals

In life, most of us aim to achieve success but all of us aim to achieve happiness. I have personally confused these terms too often and have been successful in many activities (e.g. getting a job, promotions, graduating summa cum laude, starting a company) but unhappy as this was not truly what I wanted. I have realized that in my life not only I, but many other people struggle with these concepts. Many of us achieve goals daily but sometimes we are still not happy. I think this is because not all goals “are equal”.

Goals have become a part of our life, at work even at home, we aim to set goals to achieve success. On Instagram, we constantly see posts about some millionaire and how important goals are. People, try to blindly emulate such rich people and think they would be successful and happy too. Probably the only person who makes a distinction about success and happiness is Gary V (a social media guru).

In my case, I decided to go a step further and try to define how I see those. To me success is achieving a goal (something we wanted to achieve). Happiness is wanting what we have achieved (i.e. how important what we achieved really is). While this might not be a perfect explanation, it helps us steer clear from making mistakes such as saying “my goal is to graduate from finance”. No, a goal is to become a finance professional but an action related to accomplishing this goal is to graduate from finance school. Whether this would bring a person success depends on whether he/she has the passion for this, whether he/she really wanted to become a finance professional (or did it to be successful). In essence, to be happy, my idea is that I need to achieve my life goals (the things that really matter to me). In the progress, I might be unsuccessful many times, but I will still be happy because I am working on something which is important to me. 

In essence, I apply this model for myself, my own life and I feel so happy about doing this. This is why I think correcting 3 misconceptions on super important topics – happiness, success and investing allows me to clarify many things on which people are confused and hopefully to help them understand the meaning of these 5 words.

Success = achieve what I want

Happiness = truly wanting what we have achieved deeply in our hearts. The combination of things which we really want to achieve may be an over simplistic explanation happiness because a lot of it happens based on spontaneous moments with our family, children, pets and so on, but to be able to have those moments, usually we have to in the “mindset to be happy”. Due to many problems, people often prevent themselves from because they focus on the negative. However, if we spend 80% on activities which make us happy instead of those we don’t like, aren’t we going to be happier? So while this is not the full concept of happiness, it might be the overarching goal because if we accomplish 1) happiness mindset and 2) work on things that make us happy we ought to be feeling a bit if not much happier.

Unhappiness = the feeling we get due to lack of progress on what we find as important things (our salary increases, finding a job we like, starting a successful business or even a global crisis that damages our purchasing power and causes us to feel poor). This can be also about personal emotional failures such as inability to find someone to spend our lives with or other things which we, ourselves see as "failures" about us. These are not necessarily failures and flaws others see about us, but specifically known to us about us. In most cases, however, there is a way out and this to take a 180 degrees approach (and start doing the complete opposite of what we are doing and start planning and doing things which make us feel that we are spending our time wisely (and thus happy) on the idea that we are trying to progress and allow success in this activity to come on its own after enough effort has been put on our part.

Life goals – accomplishing the things that are truly important for us and play a role in our happiness. Buying a house to have my first child and hopefully to see my grandchildren. This would make me happy because I cannot plan for the spontaneous moments which I can have with my family, but I can plan having the house where these moments can take place; Having a child could be another such goal. While some could argue that this cannot be planned, in Singapore it would cost about 800k-1.2k mil to raise a child from 0 to having graduated university (I have studied this math in a wealth management course there). So the cost associated with this happiness and not allowing this part of life to become an unhappiness (due to improper planning) could also be an important life goal for which we can plan.

If you are wondering how to define your personal life goals. The WAVERIDERSCM framework can potentially help you. You can access it from here. I use it to define my own life goals (but maybe because I am its creator). I am yet to find out if it will have any value for anyone else. 

Planning = translating life goals into financial goals and defining a plan to achieve them (some of these do not require an investment component such as buying a house with a mortgage, this a way to achieve a financial goal with no investments; other life goals can be achieved through combined financing (salary income + loan or via income from an investment apartment in the form of rent and salary/loan. Each of these would depend on a lot of personal factors, but the idea is there is a wide range of possibilities to achieve our life goals but since we live in a capitalist system, usually this requires us to find capital one way or another to pay for whatever me may want. To achieve the life goal of peaceful retirement, US and Singaporean citizens employ the use of stocks and bonds as the traditional finance tools to accomplish this life goal. They also use insurance to protect themselves from different forms of risk, which is another form of planning - against certain negative events (such as death, illness, robbery/ property damage). And there are yet others, who like me try to achieve their life goals via a combination of investments in digital assets (known more broadly as cryptocurrencies) and in stocks. There are also those more adventurous than me which use solely digital assets and consider stocks/bonds and traditional instruments - a thing of the past.

Investing = for those goals where we do not plan to use income from a job or rent, or inheritance or loans or a mortgage, the wisest thing might be to translate our financial goals into investing goals. The path to achieving at least a part of our life goals might be through defining investing goals and a plan to achieve those. Having a clear idea of what we want to achieve and why (knowing it to be a life goal, if it truly is) can put us in a happy mindset due to our having a clear goal in mind and a plan to achieve it (while unhappiness can be seen as caused by our lack of progress on what is important to us). For instance, knowing which specific house I want to buy and how much it costs allow my life goal of buying a house to become a financial goal. To translate to an investment goal, I calculate how much return and how I will need to invest, under different scenarios, to make sure that I accomplish it.

In other words, everything we want to do in life is associated with a cost - of hours and in most cases a combination of time and money. Planning how we achieve life goals, with or without an investment component, is a way to reduce stress on our mind which may cause potential unhappiness by providing us with a path on how to achieve the specific goal (i.e. someone might be approved for a mortgage and this plan might make him/her happy as this is an alternative way to buy a house, without having to invest for it).

Time allocation and life goals 

The most important aspect of reaching of any of our life goals is to allocate the time to achieve it. It is the only resource which we can never get back, so allocating it properly depends entirely on us. No one, including me can tell you how to allocate your time. I am here to give you an example by writing these pieces of different lengths and about different topics as an example of a guy, allocating the time to accomplish a life goal

You can read my entire piece on my "time allocation" framework to happiness - here.

Investing and Life goals

In investing, more than 50% still think that investing is about making money. Some financial planning and investment organizations have caught on and have started to focus investing on retirement for instance (and portray is at as a life goal). I would like to stretch this idea further because I think that actually everything we aim to accomplish to be happy can be expressed as a financial goal. 

The simple logic of expressing every life goal as a financial goal is that we would be able to define what we want out of life - the combination of different life goals and be able to put a number (or numeric value) to understand their cost. Ironically, at this stage, most people would get fully discouraged as we often find out we are nowhere near what we want and we may not have a clear path to achieve it (so many would give up on this stage). Defining a value is important, because we can apply the - define, measure, analyse, implement, control also know as DMAIC. The DMAIC framework is available also from my WAVERIDERSCM Goals page. In the context of life goals it would work like this, once I define the house I want - the specific house and the price it costs, say $3,000,000. Then, I can examine how much I have today and how far I am from the goal (to measure) and plan a strategy that allows me to get this house - via a mortgage in 1-3 years or via investing in 5-10-15 years, depending on the risk I am willing to take (analyse options). Once I have analysed what is optimal for me, I can implement a solution that works for me - i.e. actually getting a specific mortgage from a specific bank which approves me, investing all my money in Bitcoin or investing a combination of other assets. If I like the outcome of the selected strategy I keep it under control - i.e. if  my mortgage payment and salary can take it, I don't need to change anything and take more risk. If my return is satisfying, I may not have to change anything too. If the solution is unsatisfactory, we can return to the analyse stage and try a new option. In this way, I hope to show that all tools of FINANCE are not randomly called tools. Investments, Insurance policies, loans, mortgages, even credit cards are all tools that allow us to achieve our life goals. If capitalism is the infrastructure of the world, then Finance tools are what we need together with our own skills as the tools to build something. Whether it's our investment portfolio or a business strategy, a person or a company is likely to have to invest resources - in time and money to achieve their respective goals. If companies want to increase sales, they increase their marketing budget (money) and people working on it (time). In such a way, we should think at least in my opinion about investments not as exciting lottery tickets which can make us millionaires or broke. Rather, we should think of them as the tools in our system to which we have access to reach our life goals. In other words, by investing in companies which have strategic plans to grow revenues and profits, we can participate in a meaningful way in the capitalist system and achieve our life goals, being capitalists.

For instance, if I want to make a difference for the UN, I could volunteer and work for them for a year or I can donate a specific amount (or a combination of both - time and money). Alternatively, if I have a 1000 euro today, I can invest it and make it in 10,000 and thus donate 10,000 instead of 1,000 to have a much more meaningful personal impact. When helping people is important to me, having a bigger impact (yes in a longer time) I can be happy about donating 10,000 euro but I can also be happy about the way in which I did it (achieving success in investing). This is to show that even in the context of doing charitable work, investments can help us increase our own impact. However, this is also why charities also invest their own resources to ensure their potentially higher impact over a more prolonged time, by increasing their own budget for such activities via investing.

In short, I’d say my investing view is that we should always begin by defining our life goals which we aim to attain to be happy. And I know this might be a super hard thing to do, but I think it is not so hard if we really think about it (there is also a link to my next article here - on how to find and define our life goals). From here, these goals can be expressed further into financial or numeric goals. Only then we will know whether we are close or far from them and be in a situation where we will be forced to make a decision if we want to achieve it.

In my case, one of the life goals I have is achieving financial success through investing (which I have defined for myself as running a EUR 100/150 mil alternative investments fund) and the social goal of helping at least 1,000,000 people get motivated and inspired to achieve their life goals (maybe this will not happen but as a person who has worked for a company whose brands impacted the life of millions of people, so I like to think on this scale, they started small too after all). Now I think I have learned enough to have my own separate impact. Therefore, teaching this methodology and way of thinking is hopefully my social value creation where I help people understand 1) what are happiness, success, unhappiness, life goals and investing (as terms) in my view, 2) how to accomplish happiness as a definable target with my frameworks and 3) how to be successful by allocating time on the activities which make us happy.

Note:

Before reading any other content on this blog, I suggest you read the purpose of this blog from - here, so there is not any confusion what this blog is actually about.