What is success?

 

“What is Success?”

Once, in the middle of a night, I woke up suddenly covered in sweat, gasping and puffing. I just saw a bad dream about my luxurious happy life changing into a miserable one. When I told this to my father, he simply laughed and comforted me by saying that something like this can never happen unless I never become successful in life. As soon as I heard it, the question of “What is success?” popped right into my mind. The answer I got was a simple but annoying one, i.e. “You’ll have to find the meaning yourselves.”

Now at that time I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the word. So, I started my research. I asked its meaning from every elder in my neighborhood possible but was surprised to find out that every answer differed in one way or another.

Some said “Achieving success means making your dreams come true” while others said “When you work hard on something and achieve it at last, you’ve achieved success” and some even said “Having no regrets in life is also another word for success”.

As you can see these different answers represent difference in thinking process of people. So, I left the topic of understanding success for a while and started focusing more on how the thinking of a man is determined. And after a few days of thinking (of course I didn’t thought about it all the time!) I finally realized that everything in a person’s life influences its thinking process. Be it his lifestyle, his family, his friends or even the place someone is living in. Every one of these aspects together creates sense in a person and, hence, determines the way he thinks.

Understanding this cleared my confusion of why everyone’s answers were so different from one another which leaded me back to square one, i.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Success’.

After a few days of thinking I finally understood that finding such an answer is no piece of cake for a 7 year old so I gave up on the topic for the time being. And just to make an excuse for giving up, I blamed my inexperience in life and told my father to give me some years to understand life first to create the meaning of success for myself.

The answer:-

Now, after five years, I clearly forgot about my quest and was living life happily without any challenge to fulfill but was suddenly reminded in my moral science class (because the chapter we were reading was ‘how to fulfill a promise’) about the challenge I took 5 years ago and the promise I did to my father.

At first I got a little sad as I still didn’t had the answer of that annoying question but when I started thinking a bit more deeply, unlike the last time, the answer didn’t took too much time to come out.

For me, the answer was ‘happiness in life is success’. It means that if you are happy in whatever you are doing and in what way you are living your life, then you are a successful person. Honestly this was such an easy answer that I even questioned my own brain that how could it not have solved such a question 5 years back!

Conclusion:-

Well, I learnt a very precious lesson in the midst of my little quest. A lesson that I am sure will help me in the future and I really hope that you all must have learnt it too, i.e. sometimes we go so deep in the definition of things that we fail to understand its main motive; e.g. I was so determined to understand the meaning of the word that I forgot to understand its purpose in the first place.

So, my friends, you should also try to solve questions like these on your own and find the moral/lesson in such adventures.