บท 323: Define Success Internally, Not Externally[5]
Amada Rosa Pérez was one of Colombia's most famous supermodels. She worked on shoots in some of the most beautiful places in the world and was used to being lavished with attention and fame and money.
Her career seemed to be on a trajectory that 99.9% of aspiring models only wish they could achieve.
Then, in 2005, at the height of her career, Pérez inexplicably disappeared from the public eye.
People suspected the worst—this was Colombia after all—kidnappings, ransoms, murder, etc. But the truth, as usual, was much stranger than fiction. Perez surfaced five years later and announced that she'd been born again. And she was retiring from modeling to work with the poor communities of Colombia.
She remarked on how her definition of a successful model had changed—drastically so:
"Being a model means being a benchmark, someone whose beliefs are worthy of being imitated, and I grew tired of being a model of superficiality. I grew tired of a world of lies, appearances, falsity, hypocrisy, and deception, a society full of anti-values that exalts violence, adultery, drugs, alcohol, fighting, and a world that exalts riches, pleasure, sexual immorality and fraud. I want to be a model that promotes the true dignity of women instead of being used for commercial purposes."
Prior to her religious conversion, she said she was always stressed, always in a hurry, always so easily upset over the tiniest of things. "Now I live in peace," she said. "The world doesn't appeal to me. I enjoy every moment God gives me."
I'm not a religious person by any means, and Pérez and I probably don't share a lot of values about things like sexuality. But I totally get Pérez's need for real meaning in her life—for something more than the superficialities of comfort and pleasure. It's a main theme of pretty much all of my writing.
I've railed against the all-too-common, toxic ideas in modern culture that more is better and that we can "have it all". Because I don't think happiness is something you should pursue for its own sake. In fact, happiness isn't really the point to begin with, and trying to "feel good" all the time will only make you a miserable mess of a human being.
In all of the stories told here, if you look a little closer, you'll notice that each person—all of them successful by typical measures of success—had a higher purpose that transcended the typical measures of success.
Even Ray Dalio, a multi-fucking-billionaire, has made it his life purpose to educate the world—for free—about what he calls his "principles" of life.
My new book, Everything Is F*cked: A Book about Hope, is a deep dive into how we find hope and meaning in the world—and how finding hope and meaning in the world can really fuck us if we're not careful.
In almost every material aspect, the world is a better place than it ever has been. But instead of rejoicing in that fact, we're living through a crisis of hope and meaning that threatens to reverse a lot of the progress we've made over the past two centuries or so.
But Amada Rosa Pérez showed us that we can define success in a way that lifts others up, gives us a little peace, and maybe leaves the world a little less fucked than it was when we showed up.
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