Column: Spending too much time on success porn? Here’s what not to do

Note to readers: Hello world is a program developers run to check if a newly installed programming language is working alright. Startups and tech companies are continuously launching new software to run the real world. This column will attempt to be the "Hello World" for the real world. 

There’s a genre of writing online these days that give you a little peek at the lives of the rich, famous, and the successful to tease something really interesting. Often it’s a powerful anecdote that’s copied from somewhere else. It reads somewhat like this: ‘Bill Gates is happier at 63 than he was at 25 because he does these things’. Or begins like this: TTK Jagannathan, the CEO of TTK Prestige Ltd had a strange problem...

Somehow, it is implied that if you read these scraps online, you too have a shot at becoming rich, famous, and successful. Sometimes the writer slaps on a little bit of ‘gyaan’ from their practice — typically marketing or sales — to hint at how smart they are for having figured it all out. These often go viral, get thousands of likes, shares, and sometimes attain crowning glory by becoming part of the curriculum at WhatsApp university.

The problem with reading this and wearing grey T-shirts to work every day (like Zuckerberg) or trying to treat your body like a temple (like Bill Gates) is that they don’t really make you like them. Just like TTK Jagannathan's ingenious solution to the bursting pressure cooker problem won't make you a better problem solver. There are a whole lot of other things that these successful people have done, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately and sometimes in the absence of choice, that makes them who they are.

But in these turbid times — when most jobs aren’t safe, the idea of a long career and retirement thereafter is not practical and there is growing unhappiness and insecurity fuelled by social media — these pieces offer you solutions to big life-impacting problems or uplifting stories in pithy bullet points. They are eminently likable and shareable. They deliver the hit that your dopamine addict of a brain craves for.

Having read several of these over many years, I can say this:

It is safe to categorise these pieces churned out by marketers masquerading as smart people on a mission to make readers smarter as garbage. These purveyors of success porn mostly care about going viral or getting more ‘engagement’. Devoid of context and nuance, they dish out useless, reductive and often harmful advice. It is a waste of your precious time.

There is merit in studying the greats and the method to their madness. So if you must look for lessons, look for them in deeper texts, written by people who actually care about what they’re writing and strive to understand things deeply.

Their books, Twitter threads, or articles will often marry personal experiences with insights from their area of expertise to give us a mental model to help frame our own questions and arrive at answers.

Even when they borrow from others, they make sure they’ve understood it well and make sure they capture the nuances. They will not dish out advice like it’s popcorn.

Take for instance late management guru Clay Christensen who practices great restraint when it comes to giving advice. His book ‘How will you measure your life?’ is an attempt to understand why so many successful people falter or end up being unhappy despite having done well in their careers.

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The book brings us constructs gleaned from many years he spent studying businesses. Christensen, the author of Innovators Dilemma and a consultant to many top executives, brings in well-researched theories from the world of business and shows us a way to think about our life and aspects such as happiness and nurturing relationships within the family.