What is Success?

We often make the mistake of treating success as a single accomplishment or event, a light at the end of the tunnel. It may be that we are wrong. It is actually a multidimensional construct- ok, concept, if you want to be jargon-free.

What does that mean? In life, we go through various stages. We are expected to study, work, marry, have kids, care for aging parents, marry off kids, be grandparents if we live long enough, and have successful careers. So that’s about half a dozen different things already. I have not included relations with siblings or cousins or other relatives. If you add these up, the list of things we do (at least most people do) is a pretty long one.

Being a good parent may mean different things from being a success at work.  And being a good employee is quite different from being a good husband (or wife). Also, we may have preferences for certain roles, tasks out of the multiple ones that we have to perform.

It may be essential therefore, not to put too much pressure on oneself measuring only one aspect of yourself (or others) to the exclusion of all the other dimensions. It is quite possible that your kid may be bad at Maths or Science, but could be good at, and interested in say, arts or physiotherapy. Good parenting needs to look at these aspects of a kid’s personality and aptitude while counselling him on a path towards self-sufficiency. Even for your own self, blind pursuit of a particular position in an organisation may not be worthwhile, if all it does is cause frustration in every other sphere of life.

It is important to feel worthy, no doubt, but the measures of self-worth need not be blindly followed because someone else set them. Rather, you could set them yourself, regardless of what the world thinks. That may be the route for many of us to be “successful”.