The Idea of Achieving Success - Essay Example

Few would argue Bill Gates’s success, or Bill Clintons, or the success of any other number of people who have risen to powerful positions, giving them wealth and power. These examples highlight two of the biggest things often associated with success: earning large sums of money or achieving powerful conditions. But this cannot be all that success is: a child who achieves a high grade on a spelling test has been successful in their own way. But people can and do define success in vastly different ways depending on their circumstances – for someone growing up in a rural community who is the first member of their family to receive an education, getting into an Ivy league school would be seen as an incredible success, but for someone who has Harvard alumni going generations back, only getting into Cornell might be seen as a terrible failure. This highlights one of the important aspects of success: you have to succeed or fail at something – so creating a general definition of success might be a very difficult thing. Bill Gates has succeeded in becoming a billionaire – but has failed badly at becoming a professional basketball player. To accommodate this fact any generalized definition of success must account for these expectations or contradictions; it must, in other words, take goals into account. But sometimes someone achieves success without ever necessarily meaning to: when Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, he had no intention of making billions of dollars – yet he is still successful (Veloso). Furthermore, if someone’s only goal is to get off the couch, then them doing so would not typically make them a success (barring situations like disability or injury). A close examination of etymology of the word “success,” along with cases both real and imagined, can show that a good definition of success would be “achieving laudable or worthy accomplishments that bring satisfaction or joy to the person who has accomplished them.” The etymology of the word “success” serves as a useful starting point for an understanding of its meaning. The word entered the language at the close of the beginning of the 16th century, with a meaning of “result, outcome,” from a similar Latin word which had the meaning of “happy result/outcome” (Etymology Online). This etymology reveals an important thing about the word success – it is inexorably linked to results. It has been linked to results from the very beginning of its entrance into the English language, and even before that. So for someone or something to be a success, that determination has to be based on an outcome of some kind – success is not about effort or intention, but about result. This helps explain the first part of the definition I advocate – “achieving ... accomplishments” – success has to be about something that someone has done that has tangible consequences. Success is a very results-oriented business, and has been since the word entered the English language, so any definition of success must account for results as a central aspect of its meaning – a real, concrete achievement is the central part of success. The primary part of the definition of success it that someone has accomplished something. But this cannot be simply anything, as a few real-world examples can help to demonstrate. Some people have been very able to accomplish their goals, but would not generally be deemed to be “successes” by our society. Joseph Stalin, for instance, managed to gain control of the Soviet Union and rule it for many years (Sebag 13), but would not be considered a “success” because his achievements did not meet the second part of the definition – they were not laudable or worthy achievements that he gained. He ruled his country with an iron first, and the quality of life in Russia during his time was incredibly poor (Sebag 15). So while he met his needs and perhaps accomplished his own goals, the lack of worth in those goals means that neither he nor his causes were successful. This logic holds true of all modern day dictators and warlords – no matter how much they accomplish selfishly for themselves, the lack of worth in their ambitions will forever prohibit them from being successful. So success has two clear features that have been identified so far: accomplishment and worth. Those things must be present for someone or something to be a success. But this begs the question, “are there instance where someone achieves something laudable but are not a success?” I believe the answer to this question is yes. Success has an important personal undertone – this means that success must be something that can be enjoyed by the person who achieves it. A small thought experiment can demonstrate this point. Say, for instance, that a soldier gives their life for a laudable cause, and achieves a goal such as saving many other lives in doing so. Was there an achievement here? Certainly – the soldier saved many other people’s lives. Was this sacrifice of worth? Yes, saving lives is a laudable cause, and something that makes the sacrifice of the soldier incredibly worth-while to the people around him. But would one usually describe this soldier as a success? The answer, I would argue, would be no. He was certainly brave, selfless and so on, but the fact that he did not gain personal joy or satisfaction from his accomplishment (being dead) means that he has not personally been a success. This helps explain the final point of the definition, that the accomplishment must give some joy or satisfaction to the accomplisher for there to be success – otherwise it can be a great many things, but it is not success. Now that the three main aspects of success, achievement, worth and satisfaction, have been fully developed, it is important to take a moment to define what success is not, and to debunk some common misconceptions. Many people believe that success is simply the acquisition of wealth or power. Success is certainly not the acquisition of wealth – someone who wins a lottery would never be called successful. Unless they do something positive with their money, they are simply lucky, not successful. Furthermore, many people can have success without achieving great personal wealth; any parent who has raised a good child is a success, they have made a worthy achievement that gives them satisfaction. Similarly, success is not the acquisition or use of power – many powerful people have been tremendously unsuccessful. For instance neither Aethelred the Unready, who got his moniker from squandering his kingdom against Viking invasions (Blackman 72) or George Bush, who succeeded at gaining the presidency but is generally considered to have failed at executing it were successful. Furthermore, there have been many people who have achieved power and wealth yet are tremendously unhappy – are they successes when they have achieved no joy from their accomplishments? To truly understand success we have to break ourselves of the imagining that it is about being rich, famous or powerful. Success is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in the world today. People are fixated on famous people, wishing to be like them without truly spending a moment to think if that kind of life would actually be a pleasant thing for them. Success is not about those things we usually connect it with – it is about accomplishing something good that makes us happy. And once we realize this, we can start to celebrate the small successes that occur all around us – the person who takes a further step in recovering from an injury, or the student who writes a paper that changes someone’s mind. Breaking ourselves of the materialistic understanding of success can make the world a better place by allowing us to celebrate all the success that happens every day in a number of small, important ways. Works Cited Backman, Richard. Worlds of Medieval Europe. New York: Penguin, 2004 Veleso, Bryan. "Facebook - The Complete Biography." Social Media News and Web Tips – Mashable – The Social Media Guide. 25 Aug. 2006. Web. 05 Feb. 2012. http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/ Sebag, Montefiore Simon. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004.  "Success - Etymology." Online Etymology Dictionary. Web. 05 Feb. 2012. . Read More