SUCCESS REDEFINED

The secret of being successful always! – For all and specially for students and parents.

Now it’s exam time for students and annual appraisal time for their parents! Students are looking forward to passing the exam and parents are looking forward to earning a decent annual appraisal. Practically everyone is chasing success.

But the way success is being defined in general is quite flawed. Success is always tied up to achieve something, and when that does not happen, it is considered as a failure and causes a lot of heartburn.

For some students, just passing the exam has been a success and for some scoring more than 97% marks define success. For some employees, getting an annual increment is a success. For others, promotion, a substantial hike in salary, good posting means success! Success is such a contrasting matter.

A student considers himself successful when scores 50 out of the hundred in maths paper. However, another student scoring 98, considers her (him) self as a failure for not getting that perfect score! Chided by near and dear ones, not getting appreciation at the workplace and such petty issues also drive people to take the drastic measure of committing hara-kiri. All this because success is firmly tied to achieving something.

And that’s what we have been driven to believe, day in and day out. And this pressure is a major cause for suicidal tendencies even among the educated lot who have earned lots of money, fame and possessions. This is quite evident going by the media report of suicides of celebrities, businessman, corporate executives and wealthy persons.

If you are reading this article, remember how difficult it was to read the alphabets in the beginning. Then slowly, we were able to read a group of alphabets and decipher meaning out of it. This series of failures have driven us towards effortless reading now!

Consider the act of drinking of water from a glass. It is so easy now. But, to come to this stage, we do not know how many times we have spilled the water and dropped the glass!

So success is not any particular end result that is to be achieved. The real success is a willingness to go through the series of failures and yet live for another day to see one more failure!

Wise people say failure is a stepping stone. So true. Each failure will take us to the next step on the staircase of success.

Just to emphasize this fact, consider Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Roger Federer and Roger Bannister, who ran first 4 minute mile. Their records are being broken, and they have also under performed many times during their career. Do we think them as failures?

So, be willing to go through failure and live another day, may be to see another failure! And you are always successful. After all life we have got is to live meaningfully and not just squander it away on a wrong interpretation of success.

_____________________________________________________________________