| | Pondering the question raised: "how do we measure success?"
"We" do not measure success in any particular way. There is no "we" in measuring success. We each measure it differently.
I agree with the usual thought, that money or high-class snobbery are not good measures of success. There is probably no time when a human can say that he or she has truly "arrived," because tangible, quantifiable measures of financial security or mental/physical stability cannot establish any meaningful sense of happy finality in a mortal lifespan. The search for this true "meaning of life" type of success has baffled almost everyone ever.
| |  | Sometimes success is just a matter of telling ourselves we're happy. But not really.
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But it is wrong to backlash and say that we are all successful so long as we have the right mindset to enjoy. Success, by definition, is not available to everyone. Does that sound mean? It's not mean, nor is it unfair. It is eminently fair. The author of this post is not as successful at accomplishing his goals as he could be, but he has done a fair amount of slacking off in his life, by way of undermining those goals a bit. So he can hardly complain when anyone else seems more successful.
The goal behind redefining success might be to break up some exclusive club that successful people might seem to have. But this conceptual effort fails (irony, anyone?) to make success available to all, and instead makes a joke out of it, and ultimately abolishes "success" altogether. The concept behind "success" suggests effort toward an end, probably involving the necessity to overcome obstacles, and then the ever-important, eventual arrival at that desired end. Do not propose that by aiming for what we already have accomplished, we will be content, and thus successful. You will find that this does not work. Arguably, Vice President Al Gore found that out the hard way in the 1990s when he suggested a way to raise children's test scores. How? Simply making the tests easier, the Nobel Prize winner opined, would address the problem. It proved to be just a suggestion to essentially lower our expectations instead of doing a better job educating and parenting. His idea to shoot lower did not amount to success, just compromise. (And the ensuing Republican backlash against that was even worse.)
While nothing is guaranteed, a life filled with wise and discerning choices (or a life turned around in that direction if initially misspent) will usually lead to an objectively more successful result than a life squandered. In today's self-centered culture, many people are better at congratulating themselves than actually working to better themselves or anyone else around them. We want to believe we're doing well, especially when we're not. We want someone to lie to us and tell us we're succeeding so we don't feel like we're failing. The author's dad, who has scraped together a respectable, low-middle-class level of security for his family on three decades of prayers and sweat, is more successful, dictionary definition, than the twenty-something or thirty-something overgrown male children we see now who flake out on their girlfriends after impregnating them, proceeding to blow all potential child-support money on drugs.
True, some things are relative, but that doesn't mean everything is; success is limitedly relative, but not to the extent that everyone can be successful just by conjuring up a feeling of contentedness, or just doing what makes us happy. If we can all become successful just by thinking we are successful, without striving for a goal and accomplishing it, then success means nothing and might as well become an obsolete concept. This obsolescence or extinction of the concept of success, this new success by simply learning to rename our failures, is unhealthy for any culture and needs to be rethought. |
| | Posted 6/24/2009 2:01 AM - 230 Views - 24 eProps - 14 comments
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