Success: the one we show, versus the one we feel.

A really rather simplistic LinkedIn survey showed recently that 41% of people picked "loving what to do regardless of money" as their preferred answer to the question "how do you measure career success?". The next batch of people chose "Good work life balance" (30%), followed by "high income" (11%) and "being your own boss" (6%). People were also given a chance to comment on the survey, and a few of them gave more details about what made their work life a successful one (interestingly here people seem to have confused "successful" and "happy").

Now I find this survey interesting for a few reasons:

• for starters, what was the intent?? What did the people who set-up the poll expect to find out? Wherever you ask people about what makes them happy at work, don't they always come up with a certain mix of the above? Why does it matter to pick just one factor - does it mean that you could live with just that one and not care about the others? The survey seems to simply confirm what most of us probably already know: that success in work is a happy combination of enjoyment, financial compensation, enough time to also "have a life" (by the way, isn't it interesting that people would choose as a career success factor the possibility not to work?) and be autonomous in what we do.
  
• might have been interesting to learn a little more about how people interpret the most popular option ("loving what you do") for themselves. What do we do at work that we "love"? How many people would answer "being passionate about the products I work on" or "resolve tough problems", and also think "bossing people around", "having lunch with my friends at the office", or "showing off my sleek business cards"? Would work really be the same with the non-work little perks it brings along with it?
  
• the fact that the poll - and even more, the comments, are released on LinkedIn introduces limitations to what people would answer anyway, and steer them into certain 'appropriate' directions. Surely it doesn't do to say "I love my job when I work very little and earn lots of money" on a network where most of your key professional contacts (and potential employers) can read what you say. In the end, the comments end up being a handy forum to advertise yourself and the all-necessary passion and business-mindedness that encourages others to work with you and trust you with their business. Nothing wrong with that.
  

In the end, work life is a complex mix, isn't it? The initial purpose is to make a living (few of us don't have this need to start with), but the real challenge is to do it while you also enjoy yourself - do something you believe in, that gets you inspired, and enjoy the whole mix of the relationships (from enjoying a bit of gossip with your office neighbour to cracking tough political tensions), the physical environment, the recognition, the exposure, the ability to solve problems, assert power, teach, learn - whatever gets you to click, and probably a little bit of all of this in different proportions.

Now an interesting additional question would then be: how do you measure career success in others? I wonder if all of a sudden the confusion between success and happiness would disappear. As employers and peers, what makes us consider our colleagues successful? What happens when we hire people, for example? Do we hire them because of their success in achieving a happy mix of money, work-life balance and "loving what they do"? Or does 'success' now mean something else?