Why Most People Should Never Succeed
Why Most People Should Never Succeed
Why Most People Should Never Succeed: The Philosophical Truth About Achievement and Inner Capacity
By Arasp Kazemian (Araspus)
Introduction: The Uncomfortable Truth About Success
This article will challenge everything you’ve been told about achievement, triumph, and reaching your goals. Unlike the thousands of motivational pieces flooding the internet, this exploration won’t comfort you with encouraging platitudes. It won’t tell you that persistence alone guarantees victory, or that believing in yourself is enough to conquer any obstacle.
Instead, we’re going to examine a darker philosophical truth: most people should never succeed—not because the world is unfair, but because accomplishment is not a reward. It’s a burden that requires inner architecture most individuals never construct.
If you’re seeking easy answers or inspirational quotes, this isn’t for you. But if you’re ready to confront reality with clarity and courage, then continue reading. What follows is a comprehensive philosophical examination of why achievement destroys unprepared people, why wanting victory is common but surviving it is rare, and how ancient wisdom can help us understand the true nature of triumph and defeat.
Understanding Success—Beyond Wealth and Fame
The Misunderstood Nature of Achievement
Before we venture deeper into this philosophical territory, we must first clarify what we mean by “success.” The term has become so diluted, so misunderstood, that it causes confusion, envy, and profound disappointment across all levels of society.
Success is not fame. Being recognized, being visible, being known—these are not indicators of genuine accomplishment. Visibility without inner stability is dangerous. We’ve witnessed countless celebrities, influencers, and public figures who possess recognition but lack the psychological strength to handle the pressure that accompanies it. Their visibility becomes a prison rather than a platform.
Success is not wealth. Money can solve certain practical problems—it can remove financial stress, provide comfort, and open doors. But material abundance cannot create meaning, cannot instill discipline, and cannot generate psychological resilience. Many wealthy individuals are internally fragile. They suffer in luxury, tormented by emptiness despite their overflowing bank accounts.
So what is authentic achievement?
Success is sustained responsibility combined with inner coherence. It represents the capacity to carry increasing accountability over time without collapsing under the weight. It manifests when your internal world possesses the strength to support your external circumstances. When your character can bear the demands that accomplishment places upon it.
This is precisely why genuine triumph is rare. Achievement doesn’t make life easier—it makes existence heavier. More decisions must be made. More coherence must be maintained. More pressure must be absorbed. More eyes watch your every move, waiting for mistakes, inconsistencies, or signs of weakness.
Success Amplifies Who You Already Are
Here’s the part most motivational speakers never mention: accomplishment amplifies your existing character rather than transforming it.
If you are disciplined before achieving victory, triumph will deepen that discipline. If you are unstable before reaching your goals, achievement will magnify that instability for the world to see. If you carry insecurity within yourself, attaining your ambitions won’t eliminate those doubts—it will broadcast them on a larger stage.
This amplification effect makes success dangerous for individuals lacking proper internal structure. Imagine someone who suddenly gains influence. People listen to their words. They hold power over others’ decisions, careers, and lives. Their opinions shape outcomes.
If this person lacks inner coherence, that power transforms into anxiety or aggression. Not because they’re evil, but because pressure reveals structure. Like water finding cracks in a dam, responsibility exposes every weakness in your psychological foundation.
Philosophy never treated accomplishment as a prize to be won. Instead, philosophers viewed success as a test—a brutal examination of character that most people fail.
Remember this principle: Success doesn’t fix people. It exposes them.
Consider public figures you once admired. They rose quickly through their fields. They received praise, celebration, and accolades. Then, gradually, something shifted. Their judgment deteriorated. Their behavior became erratic. Private character flaws became public spectacles.
Nothing new was added to their character. What existed within them all along was simply magnified by the spotlight of achievement. This pattern explains why many individuals should not succeed too early in life. And why some people should perhaps never achieve major triumph at all—not as punishment, but because accomplishment without proper internal architecture isn’t a blessing. It’s a form of pressure that shatters what cannot support its weight.
The Central Philosophical Claim—Success Is Unevenly Tolerated
Challenging the Fairness Narrative
The core argument of this exploration is provocative yet crucial: Success is not distributed unjustly. It is unevenly tolerated.
This concept makes people uncomfortable because it challenges a cherished belief in modern society. We prefer to think that achievement is primarily about opportunity—that if systems were fair, if barriers were removed, if everyone received equal chances, then everyone would rise to similar heights.
Philosophy disagrees with this democratic view of accomplishment.
When you examine achievement patterns closely, something peculiar emerges. Many people desire the outcomes of success. Very few desire its costs. They want results without the inner transformation that victory demands. They seek freedom without self-discipline. They crave influence without responsibility. They hunger for recognition without exposure.
This is where the real difference appears—not in talent, not in intelligence, not even in luck, but in inner capacity.
What Is Inner Capacity?
Inner capacity represents the ability to absorb pressure without becoming distorted by it. This psychological strength manifests in several critical ways:
Emotional regulation: The capability to remain stable when praised or criticized, when winning or losing, when everything is going right or falling apart. Most people oscillate wildly based on external circumstances. Those with inner capacity maintain equilibrium regardless of conditions.
Discipline: The willingness to do what must be done even when nobody is watching, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when easier options present themselves. This isn’t occasional willpower—it’s consistent character that operates independently of mood or motivation.
Delayed gratification: The wisdom to choose long-term meaning over short-term comfort. While others grab immediate pleasures, those with inner capacity plant seeds for future harvests they may not see for years.
Tolerance for isolation: Success inevitably separates you from the crowd. It pulls you away from familiar approval and comfortable sameness. Those lacking inner capacity cannot bear this loneliness. They retreat back to the group rather than continue forward alone.
Most people claim they want achievement. What they actually want is the image of success—the visible portions, the rewards, the validation, the comfort. But accomplishment quietly removes something precious: belonging. For many individuals, that price is simply too high to pay.
Why People Abandon the Path to Achievement
This explains why countless individuals abandon the path to victory the moment it becomes lonely. Not because they’re weak or lazy, but because they never trained their inner capacity. They never developed the psychological musculature required to carry accomplishment’s weight.
Wanting success is common. Being able to survive it is rare.
This principle illuminates something important about human behavior. It explains why some people keep rising even under tremendous pressure, while others—possessing equal or even greater talent—step back, burn out, or unconsciously sabotage their own progress.
Victory didn’t reject these individuals. Their inner structures simply could not tolerate triumph. Once you understand this dynamic, success stops appearing as a gift from the universe. It starts revealing itself as a weight that only certain psychological architectures can support.
Aristotle and the Inequality of Virtue
Classical Philosophy’s Perspective on Achievement
To understand this concept with greater depth, we must return to classical philosophy—specifically, to Aristotle’s teachings about human excellence.
Aristotle didn’t think about accomplishment the way modern self-help culture does. He didn’t ask, “What do people want?” Instead, he inquired, “What kind of person must someone become to live well?”
For Aristotle, the central concept was aretē—a Greek word typically translated as “virtue” or “excellence.” But aretē carried a meaning deeper than mere moral goodness. It referred to functioning well as the kind of being you are.
A sharp knife possesses aretē when it cuts cleanly and efficiently. A racehorse demonstrates aretē when it runs fast and endures long distances. A human being exhibits aretē when their character functions well under life’s demands—when their psychological structure can support the pressures existence inevitably applies.
Virtue Is Formed Through Habituation, Not Desire
Here’s the crucial insight that modern culture consistently misses: Virtue, according to Aristotle, is not formed by desire. It’s formed by habituation.
You don’t become disciplined by wanting discipline. You become disciplined by repeatedly acting with discipline until it becomes woven into your character’s fabric. You don’t develop courage by admiring brave people. You cultivate courage by practicing it in small, uncomfortable situations over extended periods until courageous action becomes your default response.
This principle carries profound implications. Not everyone undergoes identical formation. Not everyone grows up with the same demands placed upon them. Not everyone receives training in emotional regulation or responsibility-bearing. Not everyone’s childhood prepares them for the psychological requirements of significant achievement.
Aristotle was remarkably clear about this reality: He did not believe everyone reaches eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia—often translated as “happiness” but more accurately understood as “human flourishing”—represents a life that functions well as an integrated whole. For Aristotle, reaching this state wasn’t guaranteed by birth, desire, or good intentions. It depended entirely on character shaped deliberately over time.
The Uncomfortable Implication of Unequal Formation
Here’s the key principle, stated plainly: For Aristotle, excellence was the result of character shaped over time—not a universal entitlement.
This philosophical position carries a difficult implication that makes modern sensibilities recoil: If virtue is unequal, outcomes will be unequal. Not because the world is cruel or because fate plays favorites, but because formation is inherently uneven.
This is a descriptive claim, not a moral insult. Aristotle wasn’t arguing that some people deserve less dignity, respect, or basic human rights. He was observing that people arrive at life’s challenges with vastly different inner structures—structures that were built (or not built) during their formative years.
Now contrast this ancient wisdom with modern motivational slogans:
- “Everyone can succeed if they try hard enough!”
- “Believe in yourself and anything is possible!”
- “Want it badly enough and you’ll get it!”
Aristotle would fundamentally disagree with these statements. Not because he lacked compassion for human struggle, but because he understood character formation too deeply to traffic in comfortable illusions.
Wanting is easy. Becoming is slow, repetitive, and often painful.
In Aristotle’s view, achievement was never guaranteed by desire or effort alone. Triumph was earned through proper formation—through years of habit-building that shaped character capable of carrying success. And that formation was never equal across all individuals.
How Modern Culture Gets Success Catastrophically Wrong
The Democratization of Ambition Without Formation
Modern culture commits a serious error when discussing accomplishment—an error that feels kind, sounds encouraging, and therefore rarely faces questioning.
We have democratized ambition. Everyone is told to aim high. Everyone receives messages insisting they deserve victory. Everyone hears that wanting something intensely is nearly equivalent to being ready for it.
Simultaneously, we have infantilized responsibility. We encourage dreaming but hesitate to demand discipline. We celebrate self-expression but avoid imposing structure. We tell people to follow their passion without teaching them how to carry pressure, endure failure, or sustain long-term responsibility.
Then we make a fatal confusion: we mistake encouragement for truth.
Encouragement feels good. It provides emotional comfort. It boosts confidence temporarily. Truth, however, prepares you for reality. Truth builds capacity to handle what’s actually coming.
Modern culture consistently chooses the former while sacrificing the latter. The result? Fragile individuals who shatter when accomplishment arrives.
The Paradox—Kindness That Creates Fragility
Telling everyone they can succeed feels kind, but it produces fragile people.
When achievement arrives before inner capacity is built, the result isn’t fulfillment—it’s collapse. People become anxious because suddenly every decision carries weight. They develop addictions because pressure seeks relief through escape. They burn out because nobody taught them to pace responsibility across time. They feel empty because victory exposed a life lacking internal coherence.
This pattern explains why we see so many accomplished people who appear exhausted, emotionally numb, or quietly miserable despite outward markers of triumph. Not because achievement itself is bad, but because accomplishment arrived to people lacking the structure to support it.
Consider the difference between failure and unprepared success:
Failure hurts. It damages pride. It disappoints expectations. It forces confrontation with limitations. But failure also teaches valuable lessons about boundaries, weaknesses, and reality.
Success without structure doesn’t teach—it overwhelms. It buries unprepared people under responsibilities they cannot manage, decisions they’re not equipped to make, and pressures they never learned to absorb.
Here’s the principle to engrave in your mind: Failure hurts, but success without structure destroys.
The Cultural Paradox We Refuse to Face
This creates a paradox modern culture refuses to acknowledge. By attempting to protect people from disappointment, by insisting everyone deserves triumph, by avoiding difficult truths about character formation, we actually make people unprepared for the very outcomes they desire.
When success finally arrives—and sometimes it does arrive, through luck, timing, or persistence—it doesn’t elevate these unprepared individuals. Instead, it exposes how little they were taught about carrying weight, maintaining coherence, and sustaining responsibility over time.
The kindness was actually cruelty disguised in encouraging language. The “empowerment” was actually abandonment—leaving people to face triumph’s demands without the tools to survive it.
The Hidden Costs Success Demands From Those Who Achieve It
Responsibility and Consequences
Let’s examine specifically what accomplishment demands from those who attain it. Understanding these costs illuminates why so many people unconsciously resist their own victory.
Increased responsibility means increased consequences. Your decisions no longer affect only yourself. They impact others—their time, their income, their direction, their wellbeing. This creates moral pressure unlike anything experienced before achievement.
Not the kind of pressure that comes from external rules, but the internal weight that comes from knowing your choices ripple outward, affecting lives beyond your own. Every decision carries significance. Every mistake echoes across a wider radius. Every success or failure impacts not just you but everyone connected to your position.
Decision Fatigue and the Multiplication of Choice
Success multiplies choices exponentially. What to say in public. What opportunities to accept or refuse. Who to trust with sensitive information. What values to protect when they’re tested. What compromises to make and which lines never to cross.
Over time, even small decisions become mentally exhausting. This phenomenon—decision fatigue—plagues successful people in ways those without achievement rarely understand. The sheer volume of consequential choices depletes psychological resources, leaving less energy for the work itself.
The Loss of Anonymity and Freedom
Another significant cost is the loss of anonymity. When you’re unknown, you’re permitted inconsistency. You can change your mind without public scrutiny. You can fail quietly, learn from mistakes privately, and even disappear if circumstances demand it.
Accomplishment removes this freedom. You become visible. You’re expected to maintain coherence across time. Your past statements get compared to current positions. Your private character flaws risk becoming public knowledge. The gap between your public image and private reality creates constant psychological tension.
The Unique Loneliness of Achievement
Then there’s a particular form of isolation that accompanies triumph: the loneliness that comes not from absence of people, but from absence of equals.
The higher you rise in any field, the fewer people can relate to your specific problems. You cannot complain “downward” to those below your position—it appears insensitive, ungrateful, or arrogant. You cannot fully relax “sideways” with peers—competition, comparison, and positioning create distance even among apparent equals.
So you learn to carry certain burdens alone. You develop problems that nobody in your life fully understands. You face pressures that seem incomprehensible to those who haven’t experienced similar achievement levels.
This isolation isn’t dramatic—it’s quietly corrosive. It erodes connection over time, replacing intimacy with performance, vulnerability with presentation.
Success Removes Excuses—And Most People Need Excuses
Here’s perhaps the most psychologically significant cost: Success removes excuses. And most people rely on excuses to survive psychologically.
Excuses soften reality. They protect identity from harsh truths. They delay taking full responsibility. They provide psychological comfort when facing limitations or failures.
Before achievement, you could blame circumstances: “I didn’t have the right opportunities.” “The system was against me.” “I lacked resources.” “Nobody helped me.” “The timing was wrong.”
These excuses, however questionable, provided emotional cushioning. They preserved self-image despite setbacks.
Success strips away every excuse. When things go wrong after achieving triumph, there’s nobody left to blame. No system to criticize. No authority to resent. No convenient scapegoat. Just you, your decisions, and their consequences.
This nakedness of responsibility terrifies people at a primal level. It’s why many individuals do something paradoxical: they unconsciously sabotage their own success to keep excuses available.
Why People Retreat From Success Rather Than Fail At It
The Deeper Problem—Avoidance, Not Inability
At this point, you might think the problem is simple: people lack capacity, they were never trained properly, and therefore they cannot handle achievement. But this explanation remains incomplete.
The deeper problem isn’t just lack. It’s avoidance.
Most people don’t simply discover they cannot handle success and then step back disappointed. Instead, they retreat before fully testing themselves. They delay taking crucial steps. They distract themselves with endless preparation. They redefine goals to make them perpetually unreachable.
Not because they’re lazy—but because transformation is threatening.
Success Demands Identity Restructuring
Genuine accomplishment demands change—not superficial change, not surface-level improvement, but fundamental restructuring of habits, identity, and daily existence.
That kind of transformation feels like loss. It requires abandoning familiar comforts that provided security. Releasing familiar excuses that protected self-image. Letting go of familiar versions of yourself that friends and family recognize.
Most people don’t fear the work of achieving success. They fear becoming someone different in the process.
This is why so many intelligent, capable individuals never reach their potential. Not because they lack talent or opportunity, but because reaching that potential would require becoming someone their current identity doesn’t recognize. The psychological death required for that rebirth feels too threatening to pursue.
The Unconscious Retreat Into Safety
Here’s the principle that matters: Most people don’t fail at success. They retreat from it.
They retreat into busyness that feels productive but carries no real risk. They retreat into endless preparation that never quite feels complete enough to take actual action. They retreat into safe routines that maintain comfort while preventing growth.
This retreat rarely happens consciously. It occurs through rationalization. Through choosing what feels manageable over what would demand transformation. Through focusing on obstacles rather than paths forward.
Success often remains just beyond reach—not because the door is locked, but because walking through it would require becoming someone else. And for most people, that price feels too high, too scary, too uncertain.
The Philosophical Warning About Success and Transformation
Nietzsche’s Understanding of Human Resistance to Greatness
One philosopher understood this pattern with brutal clarity: Friedrich Nietzsche. He recognized that most people don’t fear failure—they fear the transformation required for genuine achievement.
Nietzsche observed that humans generally prefer comfortable mediocrity to uncomfortable excellence. Not because they’re stupid or weak, but because excellence demands perpetual discomfort. It requires constantly pushing beyond current limits. It insists on embracing difficulty rather than avoiding it.
Most people, Nietzsche argued, aren’t built for this sustained discomfort. They claim to want greatness while simultaneously clinging to everything that prevents it—comfort, certainty, approval, belonging.
The Will to Power Versus the Will to Comfort
Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power” is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean dominating others. It means the drive to overcome oneself—to constantly become more than you currently are, to embrace challenge as the path to growth, to view difficulty as the necessary friction for transformation.
Most people possess “will to comfort” instead. They want achievement’s rewards without enduring its demands. They want transformation’s results without experiencing its pain. They want to become more while remaining exactly who they are.
This fundamental conflict—between the drive toward excellence and the drive toward comfort—determines who achieves lasting success and who perpetually circles it without ever arriving.
The Eternal Recurrence as a Test of Character
Nietzsche posed a thought experiment: What if you had to live your exact life, with all its choices and consequences, over and over again for eternity? Would you embrace this prospect or recoil from it?
This question tests whether you’re living authentically, making choices aligned with your deepest values, or merely drifting through existence choosing comfort over meaning.
Those capable of bearing success’s weight could embrace eternal recurrence—because they’re building something worth repeating. Those who retreat from achievement would recoil—because they’re avoiding the very challenges that create lives worth living.
Rethinking Success and Failure—A New Framework
Success Is Not a Moral Reward
Philosophy never promised everyone would succeed. It never claimed effort alone guarantees outcomes. What philosophical wisdom offered instead was a warning: Readiness is unequal. Inner formation differs. Responsibility weighs differently on different people.
This wasn’t meant to insult anyone. It was meant to describe reality accurately so people could navigate it effectively.
Success is not a moral reward proving someone is better than others. It’s not a certificate of worth or virtue. Success is a psychological burden that demands specific internal capacities to carry without breaking.
It demands coherence under pressure. It requires consistency without external applause. It necessitates responsibility when all excuses are stripped away. This is why so many people struggle when triumph arrives—not because they’re undeserving, but because accomplishment asks more than they were prepared to give.
The Critical Question Changes Everything
Here’s the final tension to sit with: Success is not a moral reward. It is a psychological burden.
Once you see achievement through this lens, everything transforms. Envy weakens—because you understand that envying someone’s success means desiring their burdens, not just their rewards. Comparison fades—because you recognize everyone’s carrying different weights shaped by different formations.
And ambition becomes more serious, more realistic, more sustainable. Because the question shifts from “Do I want success?” to something far more important: “What would success require me to become? Am I willing to undergo that transformation? Can I build the internal capacity to carry that weight?”
These questions don’t diminish ambition—they mature it. They transform naive desire into serious commitment. They replace fantasy with clear-eyed assessment of what’s actually required.
Failure and Success as Information, Not Identity
Both failure and success become information rather than identity markers:
Failure indicates: Current capacity isn’t sufficient for current goals. Either capacity must increase, or goals must adjust. This is data, not destiny. It reveals where formation is needed, where skills require development, where character needs strengthening.
Success indicates: Current capacity can handle current demands. But this creates new questions: Can this capacity be sustained? Can it scale to larger demands? What happens when even greater pressure arrives?
Neither failure nor success defines your worth as a person. Both simply reveal information about the relationship between your current internal structure and external demands.
Practical Implications—What This Means For Your Life
Assess Your Current Inner Capacity Honestly
If you’re serious about pursuing significant achievement, begin with honest self-assessment:
Emotional regulation: How stable do you remain when praised? When criticized? When facing uncertainty? Do external circumstances control your internal state, or can you maintain equilibrium regardless of conditions?
Discipline: Can you consistently do what must be done even when motivation disappears? Have you built systems that work independently of mood? Can you maintain standards when nobody’s watching?
Delayed gratification: Are you building for five, ten, twenty years from now? Or are you always choosing immediate comfort over future flourishing? Can you plant seeds you won’t see grow?
Tolerance for isolation: Can you continue forward even when others don’t understand? Can you bear being different, being misunderstood, being alone with your vision when everyone else has different priorities?
These aren’t moral judgments—they’re capacity assessments. If you discover significant gaps, that’s valuable information, not a reason for shame.
Build Capacity Before Chasing Achievement
The wisest approach to success: Build internal capacity first, then pursue external achievement.
This reverses how most people approach goals. Typically, people chase achievements hoping that success will somehow give them the strength to handle it. This rarely works. It’s like training for a marathon by running marathons—you’ll likely just injure yourself.
Instead, build capacity through progressive challenge:
- Practice emotional regulation in low-stakes situations before high-stakes pressure arrives
- Develop discipline through small daily commitments before pursuing massive goals
- Train delayed gratification by choosing meaningful long-term projects over endless short-term distractions
- Build tolerance for isolation by pursuing work that matters to you even when others don’t understand it
When capacity increases, you can handle greater achievement without collapse. Success becomes sustainable rather than destructive.
Recognize When to Step Back
Sometimes the wisest choice is strategic retreat—not giving up on goals, but recognizing when current capacity isn’t sufficient for current ambitions.
This isn’t failure. It’s wisdom. It’s acknowledging that attempting to carry weight your structure cannot support will only damage that structure further. Better to step back temporarily, build additional capacity, then return when you’re genuinely ready.
Too many people destroy themselves trying to force achievements they’re not yet equipped to handle. They mistake wisdom for weakness and push forward anyway. The result? Burnout, breakdown, or gradually becoming someone they don’t recognize.
Find Mentors Who’ve Carried Similar Weight
One of the most valuable resources for building capacity: people who’ve already carried the specific weight you’re preparing to lift.
Not just successful people—but people who’ve sustained success over time, who’ve maintained their character despite pressure, who’ve integrated achievement into their lives without fragmenting.
These individuals can tell you what preparation actually looks like. They can identify blind spots in your current capacity. They can warn you about challenges you haven’t yet considered. They can model what sustainable success actually looks like—not the Instagram highlight reel, but the daily discipline, the hard choices, the sacrifices required.
The Cultural Implications—Why Society Needs This Truth
Moving Beyond Toxic Positivity
Modern culture drowns in toxic positivity—the insistence that everyone can achieve anything, that positive thinking overcomes all obstacles, that struggle indicates you’re not believing hard enough.
This isn’t kindness. It’s a form of gaslighting that blames people for systemic problems while simultaneously leaving them unprepared for real challenges.
We need cultural messages that acknowledge reality: Achievement is possible for many people, but it requires specific preparations that not everyone receives. Success demands particular internal capacities that must be deliberately built. Triumph carries costs that must be honestly acknowledged.
These truths don’t crush hope—they direct it more effectively. They transform naive optimism into strategic preparation.
Valuing Different Paths to Meaning
Not everyone needs to pursue conventional markers of success to live meaningful lives. This is crucial to understand.
Someone who chooses a simpler life with less responsibility, less pressure, less visibility—they’re not failing. They might be making a wise choice based on honest self-assessment. They might be building different forms of value that don’t register on society’s achievement scoreboards.
We need cultural frameworks that honor diverse paths to meaning, rather than funneling everyone toward identical definitions of success. Someone caring for aging parents, creating small-scale art, teaching local students, building strong friendships—these lives have profound value even if they never produce fame or fortune.
The question isn’t “Are you successful by society’s standards?” but “Are you building something meaningful with the capacities you actually possess?”
Preparing the Next Generation Differently
Perhaps most importantly, this philosophical understanding demands we prepare younger generations differently.
Rather than filling children with empty promises that “you can be anything,” we should:
- Teach emotional regulation as a core life skill, practiced daily from early ages
- Build discipline through age-appropriate responsibilities that increase gradually over time
- Model delayed gratification by helping children pursue multi-year projects that teach patience and persistence
- Normalize different strengths so children understand their unique capacities rather than measuring themselves against identical standards
This preparation doesn’t guarantee everyone will achieve conventional success. But it ensures that those who do achieve won’t be destroyed by it. And it ensures those who choose different paths can do so without shame.
Conclusion—Living With Philosophical Honesty About Success and Failure
The Freedom in Accepting Reality
There’s profound freedom in accepting these philosophical truths about achievement. Freedom from:
- Constant comparison with others, because you understand everyone carries different weights shaped by different formations
- Shame about limitations, because you recognize capacity-building is a lifelong process, not a fixed state
- Envy of others’ success, because you grasp that their achievements come with burdens you might not want to carry
- Pressure to achieve what you’re not built for, because you understand choosing sustainable paths over impossible ones is wisdom, not weakness
This acceptance doesn’t breed passivity. Instead, it creates realistic ambition—ambition grounded in honest assessment of current capacity and realistic understanding of what building greater capacity actually requires.
The Ongoing Project of Character Formation
Aristotle was right: virtue is formed through habituation, not desire. Character builds slowly, through thousands of small choices repeated over years. There are no shortcuts. No life hacks. No secret techniques.
Just the daily practice of becoming someone capable of carrying more weight. The consistent choice to do difficult things even when easier options exist. The patient cultivation of capacities that will serve you when greater demands arrive.
This is the real work of preparing for success—not visualization exercises or affirmations, but the grinding, unglamorous daily practice of character formation.
Success and Failure as Part of the Same Journey
Finally, we must integrate both achievement and setback into a coherent understanding of human development:
Failure is not the opposite of success—it’s part of the path toward it. Every setback reveals information about current capacity. Every obstacle identifies areas needing development. Every defeat teaches lessons that victories never could.
Success is not the end of the journey—it’s a new beginning. Every achievement creates new demands. Every victory opens new challenges. Every accomplishment reveals new areas where capacity must increase.
The philosophical life isn’t about reaching some final state of complete success. It’s about becoming someone capable of bearing greater and greater weight, handling larger and larger responsibilities, maintaining coherence under increasing pressure.
The Final Question—What Will Success Require You to Become?
We return to where we began, but with deeper understanding. The question is no longer:
“Do I want success?”
Everyone wants the rewards of achievement. That desire is universal and ultimately meaningless.
The real question—the question that determines your path—is:
“What would success require me to become? Am I willing to undergo that transformation? Can I commit to building the internal capacity necessary to carry that weight? Will I do the daily work of character formation that makes sustained achievement possible?”
These questions don’t have easy answers. They require honest self-examination, courage to face uncomfortable truths, and commitment to long-term development over short-term comfort.
But asking these questions—and living according to your honest answers—is how you build a life of integrity. A life where your ambitions align with your capacities. A life where success, if it arrives, elevates you rather than destroying you.
This is what philosophy offers: not comforting lies, but uncomfortable truths that prepare you for reality. Not false promises, but honest assessments that help you navigate existence with wisdom.
The choice, as always, remains yours. You can pursue the comfortable illusions of toxic positivity, or you can embrace the difficult truths of philosophical honesty.
Choose wisely. Your future self—whether successful or not—will thank you for it.
Final Thought: Success is not your enemy. Failure is not your enemy. The real enemy is self-deception—the refusal to honestly assess what you’re capable of carrying and what building greater capacity actually requires. Face that enemy with courage, and you give yourself the best chance of building a life that works—whether or not it looks like conventional success.
About the Author
Arasp Kazemian (Araspus) is a philosopher and writer examining the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life. Drawing from classical philosophy, particularly Aristotelian virtue ethics and Nietzschean thought, his work challenges conventional narratives about success, achievement, and human flourishing. Writing from Iran, he offers perspectives shaped by both Western philosophical traditions and personal experience navigating complex cultural circumstances.
