Most people can tell you what they want. Fewer can tell you why. Even fewer can tell you where the desire came from. Here's a question that changes that.

We don't just copy what others do — we copy what they want. The Joneses used to be your neighbors. Now they're a curated highlight reel from millions of people you'll never meet.

Measuring success by outcomes seems reasonable. The problem is that optimizing for the metric often moves you away from what the metric was supposed to give you.

Most people have a definition of success. The question is whether they chose it — or inherited it from someone else without realizing it.