In my introverted mind, I am bombarded with a thousand thoughts and ideas a day. Gosh, it is exhausting! Added to that, I spend a lot of time listening to TED Talks where they are constantly sharing "ideas worth spreading." And every time I hear something worth knowing I spend a good deal of time ruminating on it. Today, I am listening to a talk by Richard Sudek dubbed "The Courage to Fail". Of course, such a talk would interest me. There was a time when I was a huge coward and a huge failure.
You cannot succeed at something if you have never even tried it. Of all the ideas I have had, I mustered the courage to try only a few. And I did so with a huge amount of doubt. Because of the doubts, and a variety of other reasons, my attempts have not produced the results I was hoping for. Consequently, I am not able to display the commonly accepted indicators of success.
But, I want to comment on the commonly accepted ideas about success.
It appears to me that most people in my society think success looks like a prestigious career, multi-story homes, frequent flying, expensive clothes, flashy cars and high rolling companions. Most people I know think success is all about having lots of money and the constant pursuit of more money, sometimes even at the expense of their health, freedom and self-respect. Having lots of money is the chief indicator of success for all of my family members. I am not knocking their view. They are not wrong. If that is what success means to them, that is fine. I just wish people would stop thinking badly of me for failing to meet that standard.
For a while, I too had those same beliefs as my family and the wider society, until I did two things. One, I looked up the meaning of "success". And two, having looked it up, I made my own determinations about it. There is more to the meaning of success than just achieving affluence.
Success means deciding on a goal and accomplishing it. It is that basic. Google dictionary says success is "A person or thing that achieves desired aims" and " the accomplishment of an aim or purpose." Success is about hitting a target that you have set. So anything can be a goal, including earning a specified amount of money. But for me, that kind of success was not meaningful. As important as money is, it has never been a major motivator for me. Just acquiring the trappings of wealth for its own sake never satisfied or impressed me.
After learning what success means, I fell into a long crisis. What was that crisis? I had no goals. I didn't even know what to want and that had me in a tailspin for years. Having emerged from that crisis I now believe that until a person has identified personally meaningful goals and targets, that person will never be truly successful. But, back then, what were my targets? What were my goals? I always valued things like freedom and fairness and happy people and learning. But these are abstract concepts, not goals.
In the past, I did earn quite a bit of money. But I confess I never valued it enough to hold on to enough of it. That was because I never thought of it as a means to accomplish any personally meaningful goals. How could I? I did not have any personally meaningful goals. So I finished school as expected and went to work as expected. And I plodded along in several jobs, almost in suicidal despair, spending money on all sorts of meaningless things to feel better and to prop up my self-esteem.
It took me years to figure out my personally meaningful goals. It took a devasting family crisis to do it. I will share about it in another post. The irony is, now that I have a meaningful purpose, I don't have any money left to help me accomplish it. "C'est la vie!" as the French might say. That is my life.
But where money is absent, my determination to succeed is bountiful. And now as a "late bloomer", as I like to tell my friends, I am purposefully on my way to accomplishing my goals. I believe where there is life there is always opportunity, so as late off the starting block as I am, here I come.
Here's to my success, and yours.
Dawn Marie Roper, Kingston, Jamaica
"Justice, truth be ours forever."
No comments:
Post a Comment