What is Success?

Just the other day I came across a dictum stating that people only tend to be interested in someone’s allegory once he/she has attained a certain level of success in life, which immediately begged me to ask the question none other than this anecdote’s heading. So what really is success and how do we gauge it?

Some would define it as how eminent one can be, which is surely a good kickoff for this deliberation. Well, let me catechize this… Other than professions which directly or indirectly deal with public relations like politics or acting, how popular can an otherwise successful individual be? There are legions of engineers who are helping build the very world around you, doctors who help improve and save lives daily and other such whizzes… Let us take any one of them and consider a mere 3-5 km. radius around their residence or workplace. Who do you think would be a household name in that area? I’d bet you it would rather be the local grocers and peddlers, whose name would be familiar to hundreds if not thousands!

And if that doesn’t convince you, let me ask you to name all the Nobel laureates of the past year, the handful of prodigies who have been at the helm of their respective pursuits in recent times. Would you be able to name even a single one without googling it? The point is most people suffer from a God complex where they are the center of the universe, but it is important to modestly realize that we are only one in approximately seven billion humans and an even more insignificant percentage of all living beings, that too not encompassing those that have already been and gone. So, when I sometimes hear in our organization that someone wants to get to such and such rank not to extend their usefulness, but simply to avoid social stigmata, it just makes me snicker… In a big old public sector like ours, I wonder how many employees could even name all the Chairpersons who lead the firm before they joined, let alone the entire Board or any Management down below, and let alone that of any other Corporation.

So, if not fame, then how else could you define success? What about capital? Well, that’s about as rickety as it gets, a notion which I can already hear polarized entities like the Tate brothers screaming against! Hahaha... To put it simply, the richest business mogul of our nation has a net worth more than a hundred times that of the richest actor in our country and more than nine hundred times that of the richest sportsperson here. But does that make the latter two a dud? It is all a matter of perspective. For a street side cobbler many of our lives may be more than they could ever dream of, while on the other hand our financial assets may be a topic of humor for a bigwig who owns a yacht. 

What about spirituality? Does the cross-legged image of a monk in search of ‘Nirvana’ strike you as the definition of success? It might be for some… But others would not be wrong to contemplate the sacrifice of responsibilities in the tangible world that most likely had to be made to get there. And one could conversely argue that having a big loving family is an ideal measure of success. But even so, what about those who were frivolously deserted by their family on a whim, despite living up to all rational expectations and more? Is it their failure or their family’s failure for mistaking their kindness and maturity for weakness?

So, to conclude, I guess at the end of the day, success is really whatever we define for ourselves. Nothing less, nothing more…

Small elements in success... #Philanthropy #CollaborationOfIdeas