What is success according to you..?

I encountered this question in numerous discussions. The first time was at an informal discussion which was not exactly a discussion but a conversation which my co-passenger struck with me while going to college in the college bus.

He was a year junior to me, but I had not thought about that question even them, and he had, so, maybe he was smarter than me. When he saw my helplessness at answering his question he continued that success can be broadly defined in three domains - fame, power or money. He also added that the order was not fixed and varies from person to person. Perspective is the word that he used.

I was surprised at his knowledge level, it had never occoured to me that success could be defined in such broad terms and could vary with a person's perspective. I was of the opinion that you work hard and achieve success. But that there were different aspects to success was news to me. So I requested him to elaborate on his earlier statement. He happened to to be a well read person. Nonetheless, he had read somewhere that success was 99% hardwork and 1% luck. When a person relentlessly puts in hardwork and since hardwork never fails, when a person reaches the threshold of success, other people call it a matter of luck. They fail to understand that it was due to the hardwork which brought success and not luck.

Luck is simply the caumaflage behind which hardwork is hidden. It also serves another purpose-- it lets other people believe that it was simply a miracle or better still the successful person simply got lucky, it was written in the destiny which cannot be changed since the destiny of the person is written at the time of birth. So, people start doing everything they cvan to get lucky. Huge responses to the KBC TV show is proof of that, so is the reason for all the state lottery tickets getting sold every month.

People do not like hard work, after all who likes to work hard? But it is only the person who works hard, who deserved and is able to enjoy the better things in life. I myself had read that money is actually a by product of success. If you work for money, the chances of your earning money are slim. But if you work towards that larger cause, which is providing some service to you fellow humans, such that they come to you for more, they will happily shower their money on you. You need not be innovative to create new attitudes, services etc. You simply need to recreate the magic and fill the void that is waiting to be filled. This void could exist anywhere- it could be the entertainment industry, the service industry, the manufacturing industry or the food products industry.

There is no dearth of opportunities, its just that we are myopic enough to think of life to be static. We simple believe that we have a destiny in place created by the divine powers which cannot be changed. So, we continue toiling and fail to put in hardwork which can save us from all the tough phases which we go thru in life thinking that it is all the part of the master plan which is our destiny.



Being a realist, I do not approve of fantasies. I am not averse to dreaming, for it is our dreams which further brighten our creative spark. It is due to the dreams that we are able to thing about things which do not exist yet. We believe in our dreams and work towards theiur realisation. In the process we work hard, but we do not realise it neither do we experience the pain and exaustion during the course of our pursuit, all because we are interested and enthused by the goal, in which we believe.

But lets look at another situation in which you have been instructed to finished an assignment by the college professor in a manner that makes you feel that it is simply a formality and does not add any value to your learning. Most probably, you would procastinate, and try to delay the task till the last day. As the deadline draws closer, you try to complete it in a hurry, but in vain. At the last moment, you find that it is too late to complete the assignment all by yourself, so you copy it from one of your friends, who reluctantly allows you to do so. After submitting the assignment you find that the professor uses a software program which is capable of identifying the similarities between the submitted assignments ans it has adentified that bothe the assignments are exact replicas of each other, and hence have been cancelled. So, the attitude here was not really averse to hardwork but there was a lack of interest or better still enthusiasm, which also was due to your perception.

On the contrary, look at the same situation wherein you have a pre-concieved notion that you need to present the best possible version of the assignment and it has to be better than any other student in the class. So you toil, and put in loads of hard work. The result is an original piece of work with a avariety of in-depth analysis. The professor is impressed, though not visibly, and recommends your name for the dessertion contest. You get the opportunity of participating in the contest, which was the dream of almost all the people of your class. But since only 3 people could participate, your name was one of them. Upon entering the class, after the announcement has been made, your classmates look at yopu and exclaim that you are one lucky guy to have the opportunity to participate in the contest and represent the college at the same time. Now, you get the picture. This was just a simple example.

What I intend to get across is that success is a step by step process. Each step is very delicately connected to the next step, and no step can be sidestepped. as you may be aware that the shortest path between any two points is a straight line. Also, there is no shortcut to success. So, we can infer that the path towards success has to be a straight line. Now this may look like a hypothetical concept, but actually it is a straight path in that it has the least number of deviations from the main path or cause i.e. an effort needs to be made to reduce the number of distractions, deviations or the pursuit of the lesser improtant goals needs to be minimised in order to preserve the energies and resourced to reach the desired goal.

Branding success in terms of power, money, fame is a futile effort. Such a branding is superficial and does not necessarily reflect the success of an individual. It may work for celebrities, as it makes them look haute and " in sync" with the world of success. But in most of the cases it is not the case. Monet, power, fame are actually all the by products of hard work. You work hard and you may have any on or better still all of them.

So the next time, you meet someone who asks your preference of defining success as money, power, fame, simply smile and wink at him and say whatever you feel like saying.