Eighteen-Year-Old Me Is A Terrible Judge

There is a passage by Nassim Nicolas Taleb - taken from a commencement address he gave at
American University in Beirut - that has been circulating around the web a good bit recently.  It has to do with how we ought to understand "success".  His proposal is interesting, and it has some merit to it, but it's also very limited in scope.  I can say unequivocally that in my case, it would be a terrible idea to follow.

Here's what Taleb said:

For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. 

Let him be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.

The general idea isn't bad at all.  Getting away from wrongheaded criteria for what constitutes "success" might even comprise part of what a more genuine conception of success would look like.  Reputation, wealth, social status - all those things that ancient philosophers called "external goods" or even (in the case of the Stoics) "indifferents" - it's been a commonplace for millennia that fools use those as their criteria.  We could add to that other external goods like power, authority, bragging rights, and the like.

But making your eighteen-year-old self the judge of how you're doing?  For many of us, that's a terrible idea!  Looking back on it, my eighteen-year-old self was a mess, for a variety of reasons.  I could write at length about that, but I'll confine myself to noting just one example here of not-so-great decision-making. 

Despite years of scoring highly on a range of tests, and doing well enough in honors classes, I didn't even bother to take the PSAT, let alone the SAT or ACT, since I wasn't planning on ever going to college. Instead, I was going to join the Army, with the idea of translating that experience into working as a mercenary. Sounds ridiculous from the vantage point of three decades.  That's enough - in my view - to disqualify that eighteen-year-old as a judge of anything for this forty-nine-year-old.

I wouldn't really say that my earlier self was any more or less "uncorrupted by life" at eighteen than he was at twenty-eight, thirty-eight, or last year.  I'm sure that there are some people to whom Talib's strangely idealistic, weirdly neo-romantic vignette of the wide-eyed, passionate kid still inside of the jaded older person, ready to provide them an insight they've lost actually does apply.  I would expect they're in the minority, though.  I'd hope that as we grow older, we become less foolish, and perhaps better judges for what counts as success, and whether we're making any progress towards it.