Define Your Success

Success! Every body wants it, but no one really knows what it is. Every one has their own definition of success. The dictionary explains success as "gaining of what one aims at." In other words success is equivalent to accomplishment and achievement.

Though this is politically correct definition for success, this very definition is the one that prevents many people from enjoying an everlasting feeling of success. The biggest challenge with this definition is that, the accomplishment in itself is very short and temporary. Therefore, even the feeling of success associated with it is also only for a short duration. Then how should we really define success? I found the answer for this in an incident that I would love to narrate here.

Once during a workshop, I asked a group of four young management students that, what would give them a feeling of success. For one it was getting employment in a MNC. For other, it was buying a particular brand of car, and for third it was befriending and later marrying the girl who was his secret heartthrob.

However the fourth one, kept quiet. After some cajoling, he hesitantly replied that for him success is working for the up-lift-ment of poor and downtrodden. Everyone laughed at him, as it was a very unlikely answer for any management student. At that moment, even I felt that maybe this particular person lacked dream and vision to make it big.

I happened to meet the first three, a few years later in a get-together. Each of them had accomplished the goals they had set for themselves. The first one was working in a large MNC and had got a recent promotion, the other had purchased his dream car, and the third had married his dream girl after settling down on the professional front. I asked them how they felt about their achievements.They said that, for a few days they felt on top of the world. But soon euphoria of achievement wore of. They no longer derive any excitement from it. Though they were happy and proud of the job, the car and the family, but it no longer gave them the feeling of success.It immediately made me think of the fourth one.

Luckily, I met him a few days later in front of a government office. After pleasantries, he told me that he was a program head in a voluntary organization that organizes vocational training for under-privileged. He invited me to his place that was nearby. His humble dwelling and the old motor scooter he drove indicated at his un-enviable earnings. But for the entire, two hours I was with him he kept on talking about his work and how excited he felt about it.

Though in material terms his achievements where next to nothing, but he felt very successful. In fact he was happy that he was living his dream.

It was a valuable realization. Success can not be same as a realizing one's goals. Goals are good indicators of success, as the milestones are for the destination you want to reach. So at every milestone we feel little more excited as we are closer to our destination. But once we reach the destination, somehow we feel a loss of purpose and each milestone that we had crossed seem to loose their significance.

Same is with life. When we chase our dream, big or small it may be, we set certain goals for ourselves, and we feel happy as we achieve each one of them. But once we have realized our dream all the goals we have achieved, become meaningless and unimportant and cease to excite us.

So it is better to have bigger dreams with bigger purposes. A purpose that is for universal good rather than selfish fulfillment can make a person derive an everlasting feeling of success, as was in case of our ‘social-worker’ friend. With bigger dreams you will always have newer goals to work on, new heights to scale.

So, in order to feel successful now and for a life time, get a big dream; and whatever you are working on direct it towards fulfillment of that purpose. In fact change the definition of success from “gaining of aim” to “Process of chasing a dream.”