Success Is What We Make It To Be…

It is certainly true that success is way over rated and much talked about. Although quite a few people have achieved it; very few in reality have actually tasted the sweetness of true success. But to every individual, success means a different thing because everybody has different goals, different ideas about what they want to achieve in their lives, how they want to be remembered. For instance, what your friends may perceive as the success of their careers might not mean achievement of any form in your point of view. What does it mean then, to be successful?

The Many Faces of Man:

Let us consider people from different walks of life, what they believe is success for them. If we observe people from a general corporate environment, then we can see that there are several workers who will be working dutifully, efficiently and giving their jobs all their best. These may be the guys who aim to climb higher in their company, achieve social status, and have a certain kind of car, a house on the suburbs and good schools for their kids, memberships at some clubs and a respectable social group of friends. We call them the ‘diligent worker’, who has certain idea of how much money he is going to earn, and what sort of life he craves. For that person, success is achieving his desired bank balance, and all his thoughts will be connected to earning that amount of money.

If we look at a person who does not really invest himself in his job, doesn’t like to do much, kills his time not doing anything in particular, he would be what we generally call a lazy bum. These guys lack ambition in life and they don’t want to spend their time or energy doing any hard work to actually achieve something, they are always dependant on others, and go through life without making any difference. What would success mean to them? Maybe if their roofs opened and God sent them a lifetime supply of food and drink so they would never have to move…we don’t know. Do they even desire success? After all, if you don’t have ambition, what do you have?

Then there are people who consider them to be hard workers…but in reality they are not. They want to be established and achieve something in their lives, they desire success when they see it in someone else’s life, but they lack the ambition, or the drive that would take them there. So they content themselves with little achievements, or such thoughts that they weren’t ‘meant’ to have all the things in life. For them, success is achieving an unexpected (and unearned, no doubt) meager bonus on some occasion…

Let’s Break It Down:

To be truly successful in life there are many things that you need to consider. For instance, what is success? According to the Grant study conducted by George Valiant M.D, there are 4 steps that can make you feel successful and happy, that can help you elongate your life and make it healthier. But it doesn’t need a general survey to understand that success is a different story for every individual, and it is not always money related either. For a truly creative person, take Da Vinci for instance, success is his legacy of art still being studied, acknowledged and appreciated for its true value.

For an inspirational speaker, success would be helping someone turn around their life because of what he said convinced them. For a lawyer, success would mean winning his cases and creating his tough image. Similarly, for a sports person, for an all-star team player, success would be delivering for his team every time he is called upon to deliver. So what defines success for a general group of people?

Is It All About The Money?

The general misconception among people is that if you have a ton of money or if you are getting fat paychecks, then surely you’ll be happy and satisfied because you could afford everything you desire. But the fact is, the more money you have the more dissatisfied you get. Because the lust for more never leaves you, and the other myriad of worries that come with wealth start plaguing you. You start to worry about keeping it all safe and when you know you can afford all that you may want, you start indulging in excesses, which leads to more health related problems.

The more you earn the more you spend, the more you spend, the more you need to earn again…It’s an ongoing snowball!

Does Satisfaction Equal Success?

Has anybody ever tasted what that elusive thing called success is? By what criteria do we define success? For every individual it means something different, according to everybody’s different set of goals and ambitions, they would consider themselves successful only when they have accomplished their aims and won the wars that wage inside. So that means that there can be no said parameters to distinguish who is successful and who isn’t. Then what is the common factor amongst those who consider themselves to be successful in life? For a struggling new worker, who is starting fresh in life, what can be a general indicator to clue him to his success?

Reading Eric Barker’s insightful article about success and longevity in life led me to believe that attaining satisfaction and contentment in life is what success is all about. It is not about money, or fancy clothes, or a big house or even many many friends, it’s all about having a close family, healthy relationships, and earning satisfaction in your chosen field that can actually be summarized as success in life, because that is actually the kind of life that a person should live. It is no fun living in a chateau in France, surrounded by all the worldly goods and nature’s splendor if you are all alone…no amount of money in this world can stump a good partner in life, what’s the point of having everything if you don’t have someone to enjoy it with? Sharing even small bonuses with a true friend or a loving spouse is far greater than toasting to your achievement all by yourself in your 40 room mansion.

Success is all about an overall sense of goodness, feeling happiness in a wholesome way. You can feel yourself to be enormously successful if you learn to appreciate the smaller things in life before you set your sights on the great and the big. Ambition is not bad, indeed it is the key to achieving your desired goals in life, but letting ambition overtake everything else in life, the closeness of family, the trust of friends, the beauty of nature, the smile of a baby, the little things that amount to so much more in the long run is not the path to success.

The truest sense of achievement is when you reach the zenith, and look back, and you realize that you haven’t lost touch with either your true self, or your reality. That in your haste to get what you wanted, you did not crush someone else’s chance of happiness too. Being successful is a tricky thing, it is an uphill task no doubt, but to get there unscathed is truly the height of it.