What is success? According to the dictionary success is defined as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” With success comes failure. These two things go hand in hand, but what one person might consider success, another might think is failure.
Success is having reached a point where you have achieved what you want and set out to do, in the simplest term. How people define success varies. Some people think that earning a lot of money in a big wig job is success, because they’ve been conditioned by family, peer pressure, and the media to think that is what we should all strive for.
“To me, success is when you accomplish a goal or task that you have and failure is not accomplishing a goal or task,” senior Blake Craig said.
To others it means doing something they absolutely love that is their calling, and still to others it means achieving recognition or qualifications. Success doesn’t always equal happiness. Some people derive joy from setting a goal and achieving something, but when they are at the top they feel strangely empty, because it’s the chase they’re after, not the reward.
“I succeeded in choir by making Madrigal, but I’m not satisfied with my ability to sing because I think I can still be better,” senior Annie Gralish said.
There are two sides to failure. One group would view failure as just a stumbling block, learn from the mistakes and move forward with vigour to achieve the goal. The other group would, however, look at it as a setback and out of fear never attempt to change considering themselves as failures in life. It is how you handle failure that determines the success rate of your endeavours. The fastest way towards success would be to learn from failure and not analyse what went wrong. Fail early, fail fast, fail often, as the saying goes.
“Freshman year when I joined the basketball team. I played in a varsity game that we ended up losing. I felt that I had failed my team because I wasn’t good enough for them. In the following years I grew as a player. I worked harder and put in a lot of hours. When we won a game I felt I had succeeded by not letting down my team,” Grealish said.
Living in an era where there is immense pressure to succeed, what better way is there to succeed than to think out of the box, experiment, and take risks. A positive approach is the only way to rise above failures, accept that it is human to fail, learn from the experience, navigate the road to success.
