Success feels good. Winning a championship, earning an A in school, building a successful business, or accomplishing a difficult goal can provide an enormous sense of self-satisfaction. We naturally take pride in favorable outcomes, particularly when we believe they reflect our ability, effort, or perseverance. But what happens when we conveniently overlook the circumstances that helped produce those outcomes? When sports team load up on the best players, or a student uses artificial intelligence (AI) to write a paper — should we feel so accomplished when it’s clear there were major outside factors that impacted the final result? Or should we dismiss that we had any advantages and simply take pride in our success?
What does winning & success really mean?
Consider the case of college football today. Imagine being a fan of a program with financial resources so substantial that it can essentially assemble a roster of many of the best 5 star players available. If your team dramatically outspends its competition and eventually wins a national championship, celebrating is certainly understandable — but what exactly has the championship demonstrated? To be clear, winning still required coaching, preparation, execution, and plenty of hard work. But if you’ve stacked the deck so heavily that losing becomes increasingly unlikely, shouldn’t that context influence how we interpret the accomplishment?
The same question increasingly applies in education. A student receives an A on a paper and feels the satisfaction that traditionally accompanies academic achievement. But suppose the student “wrote” the entire paper using AI — the A grade is real, but is the accomplishment represented by that A grade equally real?
Psychology offers some insight into why we may not spend much time contemplating such questions. Human beings have a tendency toward self-serving attribution. When things go well, we readily attribute success to our natural dispositions including intelligence, talent, preparation, or hard work. When things go poorly, surrounding circumstances suddenly become why we failed (ironically, when outside factors work substantially in our favor, we’re often remarkably good at minimizing them).
Other examples include the successful businessperson who describes himself as “self-made” while barely mentioning family inheritance money or important insider networking connections. A youth baseball team celebrates another tournament championship without acknowledging that it recruited many of the area’s best players specifically to dominate weaker competition. Someone celebrates winning a competition while conveniently overlooking that the strongest competitors weren’t there.
None of these outcomes are necessarily fraudulent. What’s distorted is the story we tell ourselves about what produced them. That’s because people don’t simply want favorable outcomes, we want those outcomes to mean something favorable about us. Winning demonstrates ability. Good grades demonstrate intelligence. Financial success demonstrates industriousness. Athletic success demonstrates talent. Simply put, these things make us feel good about ourselves.
Perhaps this is why difficulty is such an important and underappreciated component of genuine accomplishment. Part of what makes running a marathon meaningful is that traveling 26.2 miles on foot is incredibly difficult. If we drove 25 miles and ran the final 1.2, we could still cross the same finish line, but few people would consider it the same accomplishment. That’s an exaggerated example, but it illustrates an important distinction: When we remove too much difficulty from achievement, we may preserve the outcome while quietly removing much of the accomplishment.
Final thoughts
The truth is that nobody succeeds entirely on their own. Athletes have coaches, students use technology, and successful people benefit from mentors and inside connections. Taking advantage of opportunities isn’t inherently wrong, in fact, it’s generally a wise life move. The more important issue may be whether we’re intellectually honest about how much those advantages contributed, and if the success we enjoy is actually earned, or experienced directly due to outside advantages that the competition doesn’t have.
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