How do you measure a mans success? Is it by the money he's made(Donald Trump) or by the money he's given away(Bill Gates)? Is it by the friends he made(Winston Churchill) or by his enemies(Osama Bin Laden)? Do you measure a successful person by the position he reached in the political system(George Bush) or by the means by which he brought the political system down(Che Guevara)?
What is essentially the gage of a person's success in our world? Does it go by his position in his religion(Pope Benedict) or by his ability to make his own religion(Ron Hubbard)? Does it in fact go by the number of lives he has saved(Louis Pasteur) or by the number of people he has killed(Adolf Hitler)? Do you consider his success as the people he has inspired while alive or after his death(Kurt Cobain)? Is it compared with the material things he procures(Madonna) or by his ability to denounce worldly things(Dalai Lama)? What exactly is the measure of success? Money? Power? Peace? Body Count? Fan Following? The ability to kill? The ability to save lives? What is it that we can measure for all of these people that has us viewing them as successful?
All the people I have quoted above are successful in their own right. But if you compare them, then they have succeeded in contradictory terms. This does cast a cloud on our criteria for considering a person to be successful isn't it? Some people argue that the success of a person is determined by the way in which he "exceeds expectations" in his field of choice. All of these people have truly exceeded expectations in their field of choice, but that does not make them successful by the other measures of life. Some people consider George Bush to be successful because he became president, but is he truly successful if the only reason he will be remembered for is a fool's war?
The truth is, there is no sure way to measure a person's success. Each person is considered successful for different reasons and we have to accept that success is a relative term. All I have considered here is success on an international scale, if we zoom in a bit and localize the consideration of success we find many more contradictions.
I have my own view of the measure of a mans success. I think a successful person should be counted on two things:
1> Was he happy with his own life?
2> Did he bring happiness and joy to those around him and those he touched?
The success of an individual is not measured on his personal achievements, but rather on what people around him think about him. If a person died happily without a regret in his mind, then that person truly lived a successful life and died a successful man. Only if you consider yourself to be successful can you be considered successful by other people.
So when I'm lying on my deathbed, anytime in the future, I shall know that I fulfilled the first requirement for success. But my friends will have to tell me how close I came to being truly successful by their own measures.
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it nice...bt it wud be too much to say thats its only ure thought...cz most of us have pretty much thought along the same lines smetime or the other...i have, im at the point where whtevr it is dat ure doing- d ultimate aim is to be happy, smetimes u do stuff u dnt want to do (like studying ure ass off fr a test) bt them again, if u excel in it,den ure happy....but it was well put ..i liked the way u cntrasted diff personalities!
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