Defining Success for Myself

“Success” is one of the sweetest words in the dictionary. All of us want to succeed. It is another thing that each of us has a different notion of what constitutes success. To some it may mean achieving fame and prosperity; to somebody else it may mean being able to relax and have fun, while to another it may mean just being able to stay alive. For some success is always tied to self, i.e., in terms of what “I” achieved; for somebody else success may be more about being able to share the pleasure of achievement with a loved one. Similarly, people may view success in absolute terms (e.g., becoming a millionaire), or relative terms (e.g., doing better than one’s colleague, or having two dogs if my neighbor has one). “Success” truly is a word loaded with personalized meanings. Certainly globalization has made a particular view of success more common, that of having a high paying job, cars, iPhone, and more, but I think there is still great variance in the way each of us views success. And not just that, our view of success is ever changing. I have myself noticed dramatic changes in the way I viewed success. As a kid “success” meant getting better grades in exams than my friends (a relative notion of success); later it was about getting my dream job or dream girl (pretty absolute); next it was about NOT getting caught in the rat race and enjoying life (let’s call it the “health and hobby” view of success); and now it is about figuring out what is success and being just that (let’s call this the thinker’s view of success). No, I don’t claim to be a great thinker; all I am saying is figuring out what success really means to me is becoming very important to me. Have I succeeded in figuring out my meaning of success? No. May be success is really a journey and not a destination, as a popular cliché goes, but to me the cliché will be not be true until I discover it myself. No more am I being able to pursue success without figuring out what it is. I am realizing that our definitions of success are often mindless, and are based on other people’s conception of success. May be success is a combination of all good things in life: having health, wealth, power, fame, love, and character. Right now “success”, to me, is about having the wisdom to discover the correct meaning of “success”, pursue it, and enjoy that pursuit.