Banking on Success

Success is one of the most sought after ideals in life. But I had a very interesting discussion on what success actually is. It really came down to how can one person quantify their own success. We came to the conclusion that there are different ways people could succeed. I thought that it was easiest to qualify success based on an award system. Success is measured through grades, GPA, and essentially winning. The other side was that success is the achievement of your own goal. Here are the problems with both ways.

If you consider success as the achievement of an individual goal, you will have personally succeeded. But there are two different ways to look at this. What if your goal was to fail? If you did fail, will you still have succeeded? This seeming contradiction brings about another dilemma. Is there a distinction between personal and public success? Going back to the earlier example, by failing you have succeeded. But by failing, you have also failed. One of these is a personal success while the other is a public failure. Which type of success matters?

If you consider success as measurements like grades or GPA or awards like trophies and medals, then you have the opposite problem. Being the best may seem to be a success story in itself, but the problem is success in other parts of your life. One person can not be successful at everything. So this raises another problem with the definition of success. Is success set to only one event or does it encompass your entire life? Because you can certainly succeed in say a tournament, but you could also be failing in almost every other aspect of your life. If this occurs, are you still a success?

The two questions that arose when talking about these different definitions of success help bring about a better definition. We wondered whether success is personal or public and whether success is time-sensitive (as in one moment or an entire lifetime). Well, though this may not be a complete definition of success, we could describe success in two forms. Public success is succeeding for even a moment in time. Personal success spans an entire lifetime. Agree or disagree? If you agree, comment. If you don't, complain.

P.S. I'll be honest, I actually had no idea where I was going with this. It's kinda weird how you could start out with nothing and somehow end with a potentially working definition of success.