Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together. Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting clos

Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together. Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness. It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.