Success is a very relative term. To different people it could mean differently. But sometimes it gets mistaken with either fame or fortune. Well, today I figured to rekindle its most simple form of meaning- an achieved task or a goal. Startling! Wasn’t it?
While we were growing up, we were been asked about what do we want to become in life. This question kept coming up till we graduated. Even after that, some of us didn’t seem to be quite sure about our life. We just went with the flow.
For some people, motivation helps. This motivation can be in any form. Success can be one of those motivation provided it is taken in right sense. How should it be sensed then? Not to sound preachy but here is my version of it.
My first thought is, if success means just accomplishing something, then what is the hoo-haa about it. We have heard so many stories about inventors and scientists accomplishing their targets only after so many failures. They admitted that they see those failures as successful steps of not accomplishing the target. Unfortunately, the opposite of word success is misinterpreted as failure. Literally it may, but its simply how we perceive it. And sometimes, we can look it in the sense that once we see ourselves put in so much hard work, we should not feel defeated after all. Can we not look at it as a ‘Success Ladder’.
Each one of us have our own journey. We accomplish many things not giving ourselves enough credit for it. These are our success steps which we might fail to see sometimes. For instance, grown-ups can encourage the young ones by way of sharing their experiences. At the same time, youth should always be in the state of learning. There may come some drifts and drowns along the way but as long as we see ourselves climbing those stairs up, we can see our success too.
Sometimes, success goes overhead as well. In this case, we stop seeing the downside of the staircase. What happens actually is that we may overlook that we might be cutting those steps below ourselves while we are cliimbing. How do we overcome this? We can, by balancing the emotions and drawing a realistic measure of the goals. Stopping the over-encouragement turn into pamper and high self-esteem getting converted to being pompous.
What can be there realistic goals? Setting small goals can help for starters. These goals will be different for different kind of people at various stages for their lives. Care should be taken that not to be too hard on ourselves once goals are not accomplished nor be overdoing the success party.
Next comes in my mind, how much we admire other successful people and if we do, what is that quality that we really admire. This is sometimes subjective. To explain this, I came across a very successful story of a couple which I would like to share. There was a hawker who lived in a small town. This hawker used to sell very nice fritters made by his wife. He used to bring by a small basket of fritters freshly prepared at home and by evening all his fritters used to be gone. His little business was doing very well. Each day after doing their best and selling all goods, they felt successful.
Strange though. A small towner couple selling fritters felt successful. So it got me interested. This routine of theirs’ continued to be for months and each day the feeling remained same. Slowly the business began to expand. They could afford to rent a stall and keeping his fritters quality the usual, feeling of success remaining the same in their mind. The next big thing came, his family expanded and got involved in the business and the stall also become a two room shop. He also arranged for help and now had the fritters home delivered near-by. This way he became successful each day. They also put lot of investments into this, for arranging mass production of the famous fritters.
But grieve struck one day. Due to a natural disaster, the shop went down and other shops around him. All the stock got damaged and they were left with nothing. So they went back to selling the fritters in the basket again. Fortunately for them, their early customers came for rescue and loaned them money for new raw materials. It was like starting from ground zero. Only this time, their children saw them starting all over.
What was common in his earlier days and the day of disaster where they were left with nothing, was this fact that they stayed humble and grounded. Although they were disappointed, they knew that they could bring everything together again. The great help being family support and from the people who were his first and early customers. They knew all fritters getting sold out and people enjoying them was an accomplishment for them and this was their success story.
Few years later, they managed to rent out a small but productive and successful stall. They began to prepare different varieties of fritters as well. Their children took over. Subsequently, they managed to make a fritter dine-in and returned all the loan amount. Their early customers still visited them as they are make the best fritters in town and they vouched for it.
Even though they were back to where they had started, the feeling of being successful never changed a single day for them. This was because, the goal that they set was to finish all fritters which they managed everyday. The fritters being made out of love and passion. The love that comes from the thought that neither competition nor jealously is driving factor but only becoming better in it, can be. They were a true inspiration for their children. This way I felt true success in their story.
So, was that the end to their ladder of success stairs? May be, maybe not. It turns out, its upto us and in our minds how we define success for ourselves and create that new step.
We all have our own ladders to climb.
Sometimes, we might need help from others while we are climbing. Mostly it will come from our family and well-wishers around. They are the ones who helped us not fall in the initial stages of our climbing. To whichever height of success ladder we reach, we shouldn’t forget to appreciate those hands and once in a while we can lend a hand for others’ ladder as well.
Wishing all my readers to take those flight of stairs of success, knowing two things very well. One is that the new steps can be added by us to go up, the other knowing they have a way to come down as well. All we need to do is keep giving our best of our ability to the assigned reachable task and not to forget to remain humble and gracious at every possible step of our success ladder.