Link: HBS Working Knowledge

Maximization does not work as a measure of success What is the right measure of success in your eyes? What is it for your company or school? Is being really successful inevitably a matter of being the best, highest, youngest, richest, smartest, and prettiest on every scale you know—that is, celebrity winner-take-all? Such standards are maximized forms of accomplishment. Simply put, maximization is any form of going for the extreme—genius intelligence, superhuman effort, the best house, the unique lifestyle, and the most profit possible. Pick up any magazine and you can find a glamorized message of “making it” that assumes not only extreme performance but maximized reward: great wealth, drop dead attractiveness, all the attention, and possible omnipotence. What is the right measure of success in your eyes?

Maximized measures begin to start counting success at the limits, only after you’ve gone further than most other people. This leaves individuals and organizations facing a very large territory of failure and a very small sweet spot in which they can actually feel they’ve won. And the spot changes with each new competitive achievement—moving targets. No wonder we’re stressed out. Maximized versions of success are more than superficial presentations. They have the power to co-opt our innermost standards of expectation, however insecure they may make us.

Undoubtedly, goals calibrated to maximization have the power to inspire. “Be all that you can be” sounds more like a virtue than a vice. “Go further than humankind has ever gone.” Who would argue the opposite as a rule for success? But even if you are drawn to the positive aspects of maximization as your standard, most people’s sense of success demands high scores in many differing categories. Sometimes these goals contradict each other: Wealth and best friends who love you for yourself, not your money. A generous nature and being in the top position. Leading a team and being able to do everything your way. Not to mention being best at every activity of your life, from tennis to cooking to managing your portfolio.

For this kind of mix, maximization will not work as an operating paradigm.

How can you maximize four things? Can you really base your idea of success on super-effort times four? Would you want to? Before you anchor your ambitions on the outer limits, think of the Roman and British empires. Rome continually pushed its borders in a political philosophy of limitless power—only to discover it had to build a wall to keep the invaders out before it could really build and protect its roads. The British set up a legal and bureaucratic system in each of its colonial territories, but the idea of limitless exploitation became the empire’s undoing.

If life were lived in a fixed time frame, where success was measured only in the instant you hit the peak, maximized measures would work. But the only fixed time frame we know for sure is death. Everything else is subject to moving targets. If you wish to live with a continually renewing sense of success that really seems worthwhile and lasting on all your success targets, you have to give up the standards of maximization.