Like many high school students, I read and loved George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984. One of my favorite quotes in the novel is “Sanity is not statistical.” Although this phrase is only four words, it highlights a fundamental (and often times forgotten) truth: that an opinion, even if it’s shared by an overwhelming majority of people, is not necessarily true. The number of people who support or deny an idea does not affect its veracity.
I open with this because one of the ideas that is fervently contested is the concept of success. What is success? How does society define it? How exactly do we measure whether or not someone is successful?
Success is defined as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. However, what that aim or purpose means to us is much greater. Aims and purposes make our existence worthwhile. They influence our most self-descriptive choices, from which subject you should major in to what job you hope to get. Our aims and how we decide to pursue them shape our relationships with others and the way we see the world.
Success is empowering, and I have yet to hear someone say they don’t want to be successful. However, the problem lies in our tendency to follow generalized ideas and measures of success rather than create our own. We tend to accept success in terms of wealth, social position, power, attractiveness, or our ability to be “better” than others. We have slowly come to believe that these are the only measures of success, that someone who isn’t wealthy or beautiful or powerful is a failure. We tell ourselves that this is what we need in life to succeed, but is it really?
As children, we set lofty, creative dreams for ourselves. We want to be doctors or firemen or artists because we hope to achieve that thrill. We don’t care about how much money we would make or who we would impress, but rather focus on doing something for its own sake. As we get older, we lose sight of this. We become exposed to poverty and consumerism, and while it is natural to ground our goals in reality, we see our reality as limited. Often, people forfeit studying what they love in order to study something profitable. We fail to enjoy meaningful experiences in order to dedicate more time to accumulate wealth or power. We stop taking the time to actually analyze whether we really even like money or fame.
The reality is that measuring our goals in money and power doesn’t necessarily bring us the happiness we assume comes hand in hand with “success.” We might not reach those goals, making us feel like failures for not achieving “success,” or we do achieve them and feel empty. We feel unaccomplished because we focused on possessions and material things and may have compromised relationships and meaningful experiences with others along the way. We believe there is something wrong with us, that we’re the problem if we’re not satisfied with a Beverly Hills mansion or a high management position. It hasn’t really occurred to us to blame our misplaced goals for our unhappiness.
In order to combat this, I suggest we take a breath and give ourselvessome time to think: Do our goals reflect what we find personally fulfilling, or do they fall in line with society’s expectations of fulfillment? Are we studying a field we love, or a field that is guaranteed to give us a six figure salary immediately after school? Be honest with these questions. Imagine you are in a world where no one will belittle your ideas, decisions, or arguments no matter how different or impractical they may seem. And then make the decision to do what is truly right for you, because in all honesty, people will criticize you whether you do what you love or not, so you might as well do what you want.
Don’t be afraid to define success on your own terms. Take the time to realize that being kind, helping others, being excited about your field of study, and having deep relationships with others are measures of success, even if they don’t always correlate with a high salary or a position as CEO. As corny as it sounds, do what you love, because as each person takes the time to redefine success according to their own criteria, we will slowly be able to break off from unrealistic, generalized notions of achievement and become truly happy.