It is 5:08 in the morning, and I am waking from a dream about success.
In the dream, an old buddy of mine was challenging me about the 10KGuarantee business I have been building. He didn’t really understand the concept—or at least that was how it felt to me—but he was confidently explaining why I should be doing something different.
There was history behind the conversation.
We have known each other for more than forty years, and there has always been a friendly competition between us. Who was doing better? Who had the better idea? Who made more money? Who figured life out first?
And by the conventional scorecard, he has done extremely well. He built a successful business and eventually sold it for millions of dollars. He reached the place our culture calls success.
So in my dream his argument carried an invisible trump card:
Look at the scoreboard.
His bank account seemed to give his opinions more authority.
And somewhere underneath the business discussion was a much deeper insinuation:
His life had worked better than mine.
He had accomplished more. Therefore, perhaps he had become more.
I woke up uncomfortable.
At first I questioned my business. Maybe I really am wrong about 10KGuarantee. Maybe I have spent too much time building something that isn’t going to work.
But then another question appeared underneath that one:
What does it actually mean to succeed at being alive?
The Ego’s Scoreboard
The ego has plenty of answers.
Money.
Recognition.
Status.
Security.
Accomplishment.
Possessions.
Influence.
Winning.
There is an old joke:
He who dies with the most toys wins.
It is funny because it captures the absurdity of the scoreboard perfectly.
Wins what?
Death?
I don’t mean that worldly success is bad. I would still rather have a successful business than an unsuccessful one. I would rather have enough money than not enough. Achievement can create freedom, opportunity, comfort, and the ability to help other people.
The ego isn’t wrong for wanting those things.
But perhaps it becomes confused when it turns them into measurements of the value of a life.
So lying there in the darkness at 5:08 in the morning, I tried something different.
Instead of thinking harder, I became still.
I noticed my breathing.
I allowed the argument in my head to quiet down and tried to move beneath the frequency of comparison and competition.
Then I asked another question:
What would the soul call success?
And an unusual thought experiment began forming.
Before There Was a Scoreboard
Imagine that you are floating somewhere in an infinite darkness.
Except you aren’t really floating because you don’t have a body.
You don’t have eyes.
You don’t have hands.
You don’t even have a place.
You are simply awareness.
There is nothing else to observe and nothing against which to compare yourself.
There is no clock because nothing changes.
There is no yesterday because there are no events to remember.
There is no tomorrow because there is nothing to anticipate.
You don’t know happiness because you don’t know sadness.
You don’t know companionship because you have never experienced loneliness.
There is simply awareness.
Then imagine a desire appearing:
What else could I experience?
With that question comes distinction.
Something versus nothing.
Self and other.
Difference.
Relationship.
Possibility.
Perhaps consciousness eventually creates—or participates in—forms through which experience becomes possible.
Light.
Matter.
Bodies.
Eyes.
Hands.
Taste.
Touch.
Birth.
Death.
Fear.
Love.
Stars.
Oceans.
Children.
Friendships.
Arguments.
Dreams.
Businesses.
Bank accounts.
And two old friends quietly competing with each other for forty years.
I don’t know whether consciousness actually developed this way. I am not offering cosmology as science.
I am using imagination to explore a question.
And the thought experiment changes something for me.
If consciousness could somehow be imagined before all these distinctions, perhaps the great miracle wouldn’t be winning the game.
Perhaps the miracle would be that there is a game at all.
From Awareness to Experience
There is an ancient biblical phrase:
In the beginning was the Word.
I don’t know what ultimately preceded matter, life, or consciousness, and I don’t want to pretend that I do.
But the phrase makes me wonder.
What if creation, whatever its ultimate nature, involves the movement from possibility into experience?
Thought into expression.
Potential into form.
The ocean into waves.
Water into raindrops.
And somehow, billions of years—or perhaps something stranger than our ordinary understanding of time—later, one of those temporary waves is lying in bed at 5:08 in the morning worrying about whether his business idea is good enough.
From the ego’s perspective, that is a serious problem.
From the soul’s perspective, it may be rather amusing.
Maybe the Soul Is Amused
I like imagining that the soul is fascinated by being alive.
It likes sensation.
Discovery.
Relationship.
Creating things.
Perhaps it even appreciates problems—not because suffering is inherently good, but because contrast gives experience dimension.
Hot makes cold meaningful.
Fear gives courage somewhere to appear.
Loss helps us recognize what we value.
Failure gives success something to contrast against.
Perhaps even the ego itself is one of consciousness’s more fascinating creations.
Here is this complicated psychological character constantly measuring, comparing, protecting, achieving, worrying, remembering, planning, and trying to make sure everything turns out correctly.
The soul doesn’t necessarily need to destroy that character.
Maybe it smiles at it.
Look what consciousness created.
A Different Definition of Success
That changes the meaning of my dream.
My friend’s financial success remains real.
He played a particular game extraordinarily well.
That deserves respect.
But his success does not diminish mine, nor does mine diminish his.
Because perhaps the deepest scoreboard isn’t measuring who accumulated the most before dying.
Perhaps it is asking different questions.
Did I fully experience being alive?
Did I become more conscious through the experience?
Did I create more love than fear?
Did I increase intelligence rather than confusion?
Did I leave a little less entropy behind me?
Did I discover something about myself through relationships with other people?
Did I express something worthwhile through this temporary form?
That is a very different competition.
In fact, it may not be a competition at all.
Jesus and Buddha are remembered thousands of years later, yet neither is admired primarily for his financial portfolio.
Their success was inward.
They seemed to understand something about consciousness that most of us struggle to remember.
Perhaps what we spend so much of our lives searching for outside ourselves can also be discovered at a deeper level within us.
The Wave Doesn’t Have to Win
The ocean-and-wave metaphor keeps returning throughout my exploration of the soul.
The ego looks around at the other waves.
That wave is bigger than me.
That one is moving faster.
That one owns a nicer house.
That one sold his company for millions.
I need to become a more impressive wave.
But the soul remembers something the wave temporarily forgets:
We are all water.
The purpose of a wave may not be to defeat the other waves.
Perhaps its purpose is simply to fully become the particular wave it is capable of becoming before returning to the ocean.
That doesn’t make ambition meaningless.
It changes its orientation.
I can still build 10KGuarantee.
I can still want it to succeed.
I can advertise it, improve it, question it, test it, change it, and perhaps someday discover that my friend was right about parts of it.
But the business no longer has to answer the terrifying question:
Was my life worthwhile?
That is too much responsibility to place on a business.
The ego can build the company.
The soul can experience building it.
And perhaps that is the partnership I have been looking for throughout these writings.
The ego wants success.
The soul asks what success means.
The ego wants recognition.
The soul seeks expression.
The ego wants to measure the outcome.
The soul wants to experience and grow through it.
The ego wants to know whether I won.
The soul seems delighted that I got to play.
And lying here in the darkness, slowly waking from a dream about who has accomplished more, I notice something strangely liberating.
Maybe success isn’t reaching some final place where I can finally prove that my life mattered.
Maybe the fact that I am here—aware, creating, loving, struggling, questioning, laughing, failing, learning, and experiencing this extraordinary temporary existence—is already the larger success.
The wave doesn’t have to prove that it deserves to be part of the ocean.
It already is.