A lot of this thought has been prompted by looking into the future, and thinking about stuff like "where do I see myself in 20 years?" Frankly, I don't know. I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, or even 5 days. I don't know what I want to do with my life, how I want to spend my time, reach my goals, or even what goals I want to set. I have a (rather short) list of criteria for my life no matter how I choose to spend it: 1. Enjoy my life and truly like how I live each day 2. Be an all around 'good person' to people around me. That's it. I just want to be good to myself and the people around me. Based off of this it seems like I have an infinite amount of ways to achieve "success", but if I don't truly enjoy what I'm doing then it's not really being successful.
The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.
I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 15 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all
October 20, 2011
The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.
I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 15 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all
October 20, 2011
Jack, your comment about how you consider yourself successful now, even though you hadn't necessarily been born planning how to achieve this success really struck me. We spend so much time worrying about the future and whether we will indeed be successful or not, but we hardly think about success in the present. It would be so much more beneficial to try to be happy with where we are at now than to plan for happiness or success that may or may not be achieved later in life. I know (well, it seems like) your point is more along the lines of 'be easygoing, there's no need to plan ahead for success,' which I agree with - there's no need to stress about the future, so fickle, but I'd like to supplement that with the idea of putting said energy into being successful now. I find myself thinking, "Things will get better in college, you just have to get there, then working and living on your own will be even better, you just have to wait. You'll be successful, but you have to wait for the time to come." I think this attitude, on my part, should shift to making the most out of the present, because that is something one can change at any given moment. Waiting, even if in the meantime you are planning for success, is a waste of time. And thats a personal revelation-or-something for me, but its great that you are actively realizing that in the present, you are successful.
ReplyDeleteThe title to this post grabbed my attention immediately. I can relate completely to this line of thinking - this has been my year for these thoughts too, especially what with subpar performance at school.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned that you have a "problem" - that you don't have any idea what your future will look like, or what you want to do. I used to think like that too, but I realized that that kind of knowledge would be a burden.
If you don't have a reason to go into a field, then it doesn't make sense to try to point your life in that direction. I feel that my life will turn onto its real path whenever it needs to - until then, I'll be going wherever life takes me.
Until recently, I had quite a different definition of "success," which was the standard definition. I've since subscribed to your definition, but with one added point: 3. To understand everything I can. Try adding that in - you'll be surprised at what happens.
Jack, I think in high school a lot of us are contemplating success. You’ve articulated the inconvenient truth that “success” as we know it is not guaranteed. You’ve also articulated your own vision of success: that one who is successful enjoys life deals and well with other people.
ReplyDeleteThis, to me, was a clear and concise way of addressing what I have also been thinking about for a while – I couldn’t agree more! However there’s a couple other aspects that I sometimes think about: darker, more selfish things that sometimes people have a tendency to over-focus on. Power, wealth, fame. These things, you and I would agree, are not a measure of success.
You do however touch on an idea of “changing the world” or “benefiting society” on a grandiose scale which you brand as cliché. While I agree with you that this is not the most important thing—that the way one deals with people on a more micro-level is a must—is there room in your interpretation of success for this? I’ve thought about it like this:
I think that this idea of benefiting society is very much a part of the aspect of success that deals with relationships with other people. It doesn’t have to be some enormous thing, but it certainly can. To some, religion tells them how to interact with other people. To others, it is a more unique and personal set of values. Your notion of success is somewhat subjective, but that’s the beauty of it—we each must find our own success. Whatever the mechanism is for each individual to determine what constitutes a “good” way to deal with others and to be happy every day, I find the idea that success is simple to be a pleasant one. We can leave a mark on other people based on our behavior which does have a ripple effect. The way we treat people every day is of paramount importance because our moods, actions, and words often affect those of others.
Dealing honestly and favorably with our fellow human beings doesn’t preclude any sort of financial success, high status, etc. The question becomes then whether these things come by coincidence, as a byproduct of seeking true success, or whether it is possible to pursue both simultaneously. Seeking out true success certainly isn’t mutually exclusive with the possibility of fame—take Gandhi for example.
So I was wondering if your idea of success has room for this idea of “benefiting society”, and secondly, if that is what you are aiming for. Or are you are resigned strictly to a simpler notion of success in the hope that your personal peace and kindness will improve the lives of others? Good for you for being successful now. I'm not sure I'm 100% there yet.
One thing you said was that none of this is set in stone. It's all deciding and guessing and uncertainty. The fact that anything can change at any given time makes me believe that everyone has a chance at success (unless, of course, they make blatantly unwise and foolish decisions). So maybe you're having a bad day, or a bad week, or even a bad year? Don't worry about that, it'll change soon enough. That's the thing about life, it's always changing, always throwing some people off, and always placing other people on the right track. We can't expect life to be perfect all the time, because then we wouldn't be able to feel "success" once we reached it. I think this is one way of knowing whether or not you've become "successful". Feeling yourself in a rut, lifting yourself out of that rut, and rising to new levels of happiness or intelligence or whatever else is important to you. I think that personally, I can measure my own success by how happy I am. If I'm miserable all of the time, then something's wrong with the way that I'm living, and it's time for a change. But if I'm feeling happy and full of energy every day, then maybe I should take a hint from myself and continue living this way, or at least incorporate these things that make me happy into my life as I grow older.
ReplyDeleteI've seen plenty of people that sacrifice their own happiness just to reach their own corrupt definition of "success". In most of these cases, their success was measured by money, or by something of that nature. But I don't feel that this is an accurate measure of success. You could be a billionaire and still be all alone and gloomy. Or you could be making just enough to get by, but have a loving family, a job that you love, and be the happiest person in the world. I guess the point is that not all of our futures careers are going to turn us into money making fiends. Some of us are going to be musicians, filmmakers, actors, etc. But as long as the career that we choose brings us joy and makes us feel content, then what else can we really ask for? If we aren't happy with our lives, then is life worth living at all?
Your blog resonated with me because many of your thoughts about success are similar to mine right now. For a long time, success was very concrete to me. It was something along the lines of doing well in school, getting into a good college, etc., etc,: the clichéd, classic “success story.” But I had always been happy with my degree of “success.” Recently though, I was forced to rethink my conception of success.
ReplyDeleteI had been disappointed with my performance at my last debate tournament, disappointed with my musical progress, school was getting harder than it had been before, and overall, things didn’t seem to be going my way; I wasn’t being “successful” to the degree I wanted. What had happened? I came up with two answers. First, success is not concrete; there are many ways to be successful and one “failure” doesn’t ruin one’s chances of being “successful”. Second, our most common ideas about what “success” is are flawed. My previous conception of success was one of robot-like work: charging toward success without seeing the path to it. Debate had become something I did only to win. The enjoyment that I had used to get from it had left; instead I was only worried about “success”, i.e. winning. I realized that in order to be happier with my results, I would have to open up to fun.
My chemistry class further drove this abstractization of success home. Students tend to always measure success by the grades they earn, but over the last few weeks, my teacher decided to talk to us about what grades mean; he went so far as to say that they mean nothing. That was groundbreaking news for an honors chemistry class, steeped in stress, but when he explained it, it made sense. Grades are arbitrary: one teacher’s A might be another’s B-. Students can also so good at playing the “grade game” that they don’t need to learn the material (what grades are supposed to incentivize) in order to ace the tests. His talk reminded me of Mr. Allen’s discussion of grades at the beginning of the year, but hearing many of the ideas again and hearing such a shocking statement forced me to rethink, once again, what success actually is.