Discussion: What role does Love play in Success?

Here is my Philosophy on the question, which I will read at the beginning of the meeting:

What role does love play in success:
For purposes of this meeting Love means whatever the word means to you. To me love means some kind of caring for something outside of yourself. This caring has the potential to cause one to make sacrifices (preferably self-sacrifices) to benefit that thing they care about. Therefore, someone can have love for someone else, love for people in general, love for a cause, love for a company etc.
I think that Love is something that enhances relationships between people. So with love there can be more cooperation. Also, love creates trust, which is a necessary part of any functioning economy, company or household as people have to be able to trust each other if they are going to work together. Yes, some trust issues can be avoided through legal documents etc. but it is impossible to cover all areas of life with legal stipulations and furthermore, enforcing these documents are expensive. I think love also gives one motivation. If you have love for something whether that is a person or a cause and the work you are doing is somehow related to that, then you will be more motivated in your work in order to achieve that cause or help that person. There are many books that have been written relating a strong belief in what you are doing for work with success.

Love increases the range of possible actions that can be taken: while most of the time people are self-optimizing entities, love allows for actions where the individual acts selflessly in furtherance of something else. This may be seen in a person who risks their own life in researching a cure for some disease, which can’t be justified in their personal cost benefit analysis. Therefore, having love expressed the right way increases the value and ultimately success of the thing that contains it whether that be a household, company , country or the world. Taking the inverse of this you can decide what has meaning to you and act with love (altruism) towards that thing to the degree it has meaning to you to increase that things value. This is not the typical way love works as usually it starts with an emotion and ends up with a mental decision to take an action, but can start from the mental decision directly.

Furthermore, I think that Love is something that can give your life more meaning and make life more enjoyable. Love fills something in our psyche that strict economic utilitarianism cannot, it is something that gives life a flavor, which without life looses a majority of its meaning. And in life meaning is a big factor in your ultimate success.

On the flip side, Love may also hinder success because it has the tendency to make you bias. If you love something you may do illogical things in order to support that thing. For example, you may be a CEO of a business who becomes obsessed with a certain division that is under performing and has bad prospects, but because you like that areas mission a lot you continue to fund it, but that causes your company to achieve bad results and you eventually get fired. Love may also cause you to see things in a bias manner as maybe you love someone but they are taking advantage of you, so you don’t stand up for yourself. Or you may be a judge who comes to an unfair ruling because of a bias caused by love. In this sense having love expressed the wrong way decreases the value of the thing that contains it.

Also, if you love someone and you loose that person, then it can be unbearably difficult and could cause depression and apathy, whereby if you didn’t love them then you would not have had that reaction. Love can give rise to hate and other negative emotions because they frustrate the desire of your love. These negative emotions can be damaging to you personally and those around you.

So I think Love’s effect on success depends on how you apply it. It can be a positive motivator and value enhancer, but one must be vigilant in ensuring that one does not allow a frustrated love to cause negative emotions and that love doesn’t cause one to become overly bias. Also, I think the expression of love, which is altruism, can be used to increase the value of things that have meaning to you determined from a (top-down) reasoning standpoint, so acting on love doesn’t need to start with an emotion.

Reddy and I (and Maybe Will??) are hosting the following series on Success:

We had our introductory discussion on what is success. From that there seemed to be a consensus that the major drivers of success were the non material things, love, contentment, how you live etc. During that discussion I developed some follow up questions on which we will have discussions/debates:

But before that, the Zoom link will be posted shortly before the event. During the discussion, if you want to raise a point please raise your hand and you will have up to 3 minutes to speak. Once a speaker talks there will be a 5 minute period where anyone can follow up with a counter point, question, or continuing thought along the same line of thought (leave such comments to 1 minute). But do not begin a new train of thought unless you raise your hand. If you find yourself dominating the conversation please relax and give others a chance to join in.

6/4 Discussion: Is being successful a good thing to strive for? (Or is it better to just live and enjoy your life?) We decided that a drive for success is innate like the desire of a salmon to swim upstream to reproduce. Allowing that drive to take on societies version of success is probably wrong, but developing an individual form of success is more nuanced and may be good or bad, depending if you have an adequate understanding of yourself.

6/11/26 week: What is our greatest drive as humans? To optimize our lives
6/18/26 week: What is our view on what success is as a society? Money, Continuation of Society/Species, Community
6/25/26 week: Is success inside or outside us? It is a mix, usually for younger people more outside as you get older more internally driven. But ultimately, if it is determined by happiness and contentment it has to be internal.
7/2/26 Week: What does it mean to be yourself? The statement "be yourself" has implicit assumptions including: there is a yourself to be and that it is best to be yourself. This is in comparison to the imperative to "know yourself" which implies that you need to evaluate yourself and correct any character flaws you may have. I think the best was a yin and yang relationship between "be yourself" and "know yourself" proposed by Sonny where you perform the self analysis to know yourself and then you go about being yourself in everyday life allowing you to do further analysis taking into account direct experience. But in direct answer to the question, being yourself seems to be the ability to both know what your values are and act in accordance with them.
7-9 Discussion: Is an individual’s view of success more legitimate than that of the group or vice versa? We thought that the group has a large effect on what success ultimately is and your options to move etc. to put yourself in different scenarios are there, but may be limited. So it is situation dependent but is likely the groups view.
7-16 Discussion: How are success, what is good and happiness related? Happiness is often an essential ingredient in being successful as you need to be engaged to be successful at something. And happiness often comes from doing what is good.
7-24 Discussion: Is success how you live or what you accomplish while living or both? A common theme we found was that a feeling of gratification/meaning comes from accomplishing a goal, solving a problem or overcoming a constraint. These are "how you live" subjective feelings and are the main intrinsically valuable things we experience in life. Whereby material things like say a large house does not have any intrinsic value. Therefore, we believe it is "how you live" that determines whether you lived a successful life
7-30 Discussion: Constant Craving- Can we ever be satisfied? We will listen to and discuss the following youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vao9HN_FqOE The video considered all non presentism to be bad as it believes the only place you can be happy and really successful is in the present. But the group was mixed as to whether or not they agreed with that. Some believed that planning and striving for success was inherent in our biology while others believed that being in the now was the best way to spend the majority of ones life. These two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
8-6 Discussion: Can you be entirely in control of your own success? Aristotle and Plato believed that the most important aspects of success were internal soul related aspects that individuals were entirely in control of. Yet they still believed that certain prerequisites were necessary to achieve it, such as being in the right environment to receive an education in moral philosophy. Similarly, we thought that even if you take this view of success (internal character development) the prerequisites like having adequate intelligence and self-awareness that set one on such a path, are largely genetic characteristics, which one is not in control of. Then if you take the outward version of success like material things, then it becomes -more clear that you cant be entirely in control of it. So it depends on what we mean by "you" (is this you before or after birth) and "success".
Three part Mini Series: Practical Philosophy for Life:
8-13 Discussion : What is it?
8-20 Discussion: How to Apply it? We decided that the best way to apply a practical philosophy is to first understand it and then understand your own situation, which will allow you to develop goals and then use science as an aide in implementing those goals.
8-27 Discussion: Can you Form Your Own? Yes, it is best if it is based on the reasoning section of the brain as opposed to the unconsious/nonreasoning part. A practical philosophy should be tested against reality and modified as needed.
9-3: Which philosophy provides the best path to success: Hedonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Aristotelianism? Stoic concepts have helped people achieve success in modernity through things like CBT. Aristotelianism is good becuase it is practical and analytical. Epicureanism is good because it is realistic. All these philosophies have their positives overall taking a mosiac of them might work well as long as you can retain necessary parts of their underlying themes.
9-10: How can you go into something knowing you are going to get out of it what you intended? You first want to know what your desires are, part of that is knowing what your values are. Then once you know your desires you can set goals in alignment with those desires. You want to utilize empirical evidence in setting goals and once implemented obtain feedback to make sure you are still accomplishing the goal and it is in alignment with your desires.
9-17-26: How can you do the best you can in life? Doing your best is not just a matter of trying your hardest, you also need to have the right tools at your disposal and need favorable guidance from those who influence you throughout your life. Knowing your values & desires, setting goals in accordance with those desires as well as being happy/enjoying life through developing positive relationships, having freedom to act how you choose all the while living in accordance with virtue is a way to live that may bring one close to doing their best. Not only does doing your best consist of organizing your life in a rational way, but also certain practices you can engage in such as meditation and self reflection. System 1 of the brain is automatic and several times faster than system 2, which is the more logical consious section of the brain. One key to self determination in your mental state is in using system 2 to override the automatic responses developed by system 1.
9-24: Can you be successful without spirituality? We decided that Spirituality used in moderation and properly can be an aid in both material and may be essential to non-material success. It seems to be inherent in the human condition to a certain degree.
10-1: Does your success in life only matter if there is some kind of an afterlife? We determined that a finite world is necessary in order to develop some kind of morality while alive, then the infinite afterlife, if it exists, may continue the trajectory set while alive.
10-8: Meta best vs. micro best, are these always aligned? No, you may have a personality flaw or just a lack of forethought that causes you to seek temporary goals out of line with your long term aim. But if you understand your true desires and put in the forethought then a great poportion of your short term goals can align with your long term goals, although there will always be some tradeoffs amongst them.
This Week: What role does Love play in success?
Are there lessons we are sent to earth to learn?

This discussion is deliberately open ended, so please don't come on to the meeting and start saying we need to have definitions like what is success etc. That being said I don't mind you saying to me success is blah blah, therefore I think a successful life is so and so. But I want to encourage different perspectives.

.