Is success a science and fulfilment an art?

Every area of life has two levels. On one runs success, and success is a science: you can learn the steps from someone who already holds the result, repeat them and get roughly the same thing. On the other runs fulfilment, and nobody hands that one over finished. There are tools for it, no recipe. I explained this in three videos in 2016, and it holds. Back then I called the two levels form and ground. The form is what is visible and countable: the degree, the income, the body, a relationship seen from outside. The ground lies underneath, and I called it the level of the soul. Both exist in every area. The mistake I saw everywhere was building only that, and then being surprised that the finished house stays empty. The distinction is not mine, it comes from the world around Tony Robbins, where I spent years as a teenager, daily, with videos and audiobooks. Today I see it more soberly. A lot of it is unscientific, and at the live events a great deal gets sold, usually the next stage of the programme mid event. The audiobooks were the most valuable part, because there you get the thought and not the stage. A thought does not become wrong because it sat in a sales room, and the sixteen year old who carried it out did something right with it.

Where this comes from

The distinction is not mine, it comes from the world around Tony Robbins, where I spent years as a teenager, daily, with videos and audiobooks. Today I see it more soberly. A lot of it is unscientific, and at the live events a great deal gets sold, usually the next stage of the programme mid event. The audiobooks were the most valuable part, because there you get the thought and not the stage. A thought does not become wrong because it sat in a sales room, and the sixteen year old who carried it out did something right with it.

Success can be copied

The scientific part is easier. Find someone standing where you want to go, look at the steps that person actually took, and take them too. In 2016 I split this across three areas, career, health and relationships, with two principles each: give more value and then actually ask for something, let good things in and challenge yourself, build trust and show passion. That is a procedure, repeatable and therefore teachable.

It is not a science, it is an art, an art where you can get tools.

For the second level none of that works. You can see what fulfils a person, do the same, and nothing happens. Tools exist all the same: going quiet, walking in nature, breathing on purpose. They open the door, you walk through it yourself.

  • Repeatable: the steps of a person who already holds your result, including their attitude on the way.
  • Repeatable: a procedure you write down the moment it works once, with the numbers and deadlines that show later whether you fooled yourself.
  • Only grows: what fulfils you. It cannot be copied or forced, you can only set up the conditions.
  • Only grows: the trust that things turn out well. It appears in hindsight, when you see what the hard years made of you.
  • Only grows: the joy in a thing. It ignores your plan and shows up in the middle of the doing.

The order I reversed

Most people build the form first and look for the ground afterwards. With me it ran the other way round, more by accident than by plan. I first worked out how to live fulfilled and have been building the form on that ever since. Whoever finishes the form first ends up on top of it one day, seeing they built the wrong one. The other way round takes longer before anything visible stands, and then the right thing stands there.

The ground underneath I call basic trust, the feeling that everything is fine. That the hardest moments of your past brought you exactly here, and that the future carries too. It is a skill, not a claim about the world, and mine grew from something I did not want to attend.

Dancing saved a life of mine, I think.

Dancing gave me strength at school, when I was being messed with. For the length of one song I was out of my head and back in my body. Before that I had run a project called Lebensstreber, about getting the best potential out of a person. In this video I call myself a life artist for the first time. The difference is exactly the second level. You can shine in the form and stay empty.

What children are good at

For the art I copied from the youngest. Children are fulfilled without holding a procedure for it.

Young, small children, they are really brilliant when it comes to being fulfilled.

I saw three things. They explore and test their limits. They enjoy, both the single moment and the way life goes up and down. And they share. The third is the strongest, because sharing dissolves your own limits. What you found out lives on in people you will never meet.

The same question, ten years later

The distinction grew up with me and has a different name now. In the speech Three Keys three things come before any work with AI: clear values, a North Star, and the things you unreasonably want to keep doing yourself. The first two can be written down and sharpened, that is the form. The third key is the art of 2016 in the language of today, and the only one nobody takes off your hands, machines included. My own North Star is education, rethought from first principles, and in the school behind paideia the second level is called meaning.

Three things stay practical. Separate the levels before you set a goal, or you build neatly at a form you never wanted. Treat the form as a craft and start at the smallest step, see Which domino falls first? Do not measure the ground with the instruments of the form, it reports through feelings, see What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you? That your worth hangs on neither level stands in Are you the player or the character? The distinction itself is one mental model among many, see the open book world-modeling.

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Planted from three of my own videos from 2016.

ZukunftBilden GmbH · Salzburg · +43 681 81655313 · office@zukunftbilden.eu