The Mountain of Success & The Spiral Of Fulfillment
Do you know the difference?
I’m going to share a chapter from Conscious Accomplishment every week for the next few weeks on topics I think might be particularly helpful.
Today’s chapter outlines the distinction between Success and Fufillment, as well as where higher forms of fufillment actually come from. This is very useful to understand if you aspire to evolve your consciounsess and create the change you wish to see in the world at the same time.
Chapter 16: The Mountain of Success & The Spiral Of Fulfillment
When you want to take your awareness to a higher altitude, many factors matter for your ascent. You need to have the right training, tools, and an understanding of the terrain. But perhaps more important than all these things is making sure the path you’ve chosen will lead you to where you want to go.
As someone who had a fair amount of worldly success, yet lived on the daily roller coaster of conditional well-being, I no longer believe that success and fulfillment are the same. I chased success because I thought it would make me happy. Although each achievement generated a temporary blip of happiness, the feeling never lasted. After the glow faded away, I was back on the treadmill to create the next blip. It took many years of playing this game at a high level to recognize that what I really wanted wasn’t more success, but an enduring state of well-being and fulfillment.
Success is the achievement of desired outcomes. Though success is ultimately subjective, your concept of success is informed by your conditioning. It’s why in some cultures success can mean being rich and famous, while in others it’s measured by having a big family or deep spiritual connection. It’s important to recognize that until you start to investigate your consciousness, your definition of success is mostly inherited.
Most people relate to success like reaching the summit of a mountain. They envision a specific destination, believing life will finally feel complete once they arrive. Success could be hitting a certain net worth, finding your dream partner, selling your company, or—if you tend to create excessive expectations for yourself like I did—all of the above. It’s true that when you finally reach the summit, you feel amazing. The problem is you can’t live on the mountaintop. So after the sweetness of enjoying the breathtaking view, you’re off to find the next mountain to climb to recreate this feeling.
Though success is often commingled with fulfillment, they are distinct. Fulfillment is a deep and lasting sense of satisfaction, contentment, and completeness. It often arises from achieving goals, living in alignment, and finding meaning. There are fulfilled people who are wildly successful and others who don’t have a penny to their name.
These definitions clarify that success is a concept while fulfillment is the enduring state of well-being that most people truly desire. Understanding the difference can help you get clear on which path you want to be on. Do you want to satisfy some conditioned definition of success in order to temporarily feel good. Or are you after a persistent and unconditional sense of well-being? It’s common to conflate these things, but as far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between having a nice house, an impressive career, or social status, and one’s capacity for unconditional well-being.
Conscious Accomplishment recognizes that success without fulfillment isn’t a worthwhile pursuit. You certainly can have both, but having one does not imply the other. Conscious Accomplishment offers a path to move towards success while enjoying the sense of fulfillment that comes from consciousness evolution.
Years of working with my response to life to explore and expand my consciosness shifted my primary source of fulfillment in a way that I would have never anticipated. Like many self-improvement junkies, before this I immersed myself in all kinds of personal development exercises that I thought would lead to happiness. I remember regularly scoring my career, finances, relationships, and all the other quadrants of my life year after year. I’d then denote the changes I needed to make in each aspect of my life to improve things. Although these exercises created some positive things in my life, they also perpetuated an illusion that the promised land of happiness was just a few achievements away. I convinced myself that constantly trying to improve my external world was how I found fulfillment. The problem with this approach is that it never never fundamentally changed how I felt. Despite all this intentional lifestyle design and accomplishment, being me still felt the same.
When I got on the consciousness journey, I finally found the enduring fulfillment I was looking for. The daily process of discovering more of myself became the most consistent source of meaning and satisfaction I had ever known. The fulfillment wasn’t limited to some peak moment, but persisted as awareness and realization expanded. And unlike waiting to reach the summit to feel whole, this process could be lived in every moment.
A key understanding in Conscious Accomplishment is that the process of consciousness evolution often provides the greatest source of fulfillment in the human experience. Becoming aware of your true nature and the deeper layers of reality infuses profound meaning into everything you do. When you integrate this into the accomplishment process, the source of fulfillment shifts from achieving an outcome, to the process itself. This is true no matter what level of success you ultimately achieve. Embracing this approach doesn’t minimize the fulfillment you may receive from your relationships, career, recreational activities, or contribution to your community. You can fully honor and enjoy these too. In fact, it’s more likely you’ll be fulfilled by these activities as your heart opens and unhealthy patterns fall away. The path isn’t choosing one source of fulfillment or another, but learning to enjoy it all, while recognizing that shifts in consciousness have a rippling effect on everything else.
If the quest for success is like climbing a mountain, pursuing fulfillment through consciousness evolution is like ascending an upward spiral. Instead of narrowing and ending at the apex, the spiraling-up journey expands outward and goes on forever. The primary rewards as you ascend are the progressive increases in well-being and understanding. Unlike the fleeting periods of joy at the top of the mountain, the upward spiral creates a new baseline state that you get to enjoy every moment moving forward regardless of the outcomes you achieve. This process and the life improvements it creates are so rewarding that it naturally motivates you to continue spiraling upwards.
Pursuing the spiraling-up path of fulfillment doesn’t mean that you have to settle for being less successful. You can still accomplish everything you desire, perhaps even more, because you’re moving from a place of deeper clarity, alignment, and internal steadiness. The key difference is that success is no longer the primary source of your fulfillment. Instead, your well-being and fulfillment are internally generated, and your success is a natural expression of your inner state.
Before starting my ascent up the spiral, I wondered whether I could still fully embrace all the activities that I once relied on to feel good. Was going to the gym, thriving in business, or being a social butterfly compatible with my spiraling-up journey? Yes, absolutely. The spiraling-up path makes room to enjoy conventional sources of fulfillment. It just doesn’t exclusively rely on them to feel good. As you make the ascent, you’ll start to see a symbiotic relationship emerge between consciousness evolution and enjoying life’s experiences. You appreciate the joy from your aspirations and their capacity to expand your awareness. And the more you use the opportunities they create, the easier it is to enjoy yourself. Each side of this interplay informs the other in an enriching and enlivening way.
Now that you understand the path of the upward spiral, I want to prepare you for the terrain you’ll have to navigate when practicing Conscious Accomplishment. These dynamics can be found in all spiritual paths, but they’re particularly prominent when attempting to hold your desire for consciousness evolution and accomplishment simultaneously. Instead of learning the hard way like I did, I’m telling you what you need to know while you’re starting your ascent to make it easier. Known obstacles you will face include managing trade-offs and creating healthy relationships with ambition, desire, and attachments. Understanding how to move through all of this will help you evaluate yourself from a holistic perspective. The more you learn to navigate this terrain skillfully, the smoother your ascent will be. Consider this your briefing as you begin the most rewarding climb you will ever make.
Main Teachings
Success is the achievement of desired outcomes, whereas fulfillment is a deep and lasting sense of satisfaction, contentment, and completeness.
How you define success is highly influenced by your conditioning.
Conscious Accomplishment prioritizes fulfillment over success, recognizing you can have both.
The greatest level of fulfillment comes from the process of continuously developing greater levels of awareness, realization, and wisdom.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter! You can keep reading or listening by checking out Conscious Accomplishment on Amazon.
Next week I’ll be sharing on Ambition: Clean vs. Dirty Fuel.
The best definition of success I adopted, integrated and embodied some 54 years ago from my spiritual teacher is: "The warmth of a person's heart".
This fits well with the heart being the portal to infinite consciousness, is observable and even measurable as a behaviour.
Great article, thank you.