Is success more about accomplishing things you want to accomplish, or about avoiding things you want to avoid?
Is success more about accomplishing things you want to accomplish, or about avoiding things you want to avoid?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: 'Happiness is the end of virtue, and truth knowledge of the means.'
To me, true success seems the end of ability, and a truly successful person basically has no further potential to benefit him/herself, but possibly to benefit others. A successful person owns the riches, material and/or immaterial, to the point of full contentment, and has the kind gratitude to spread those riches to others.
If someone asked me, 'how are you today?', it will be very unlikely for me to response by saying, 'I feel successful!'. Fine, good, great, happy would be my common response, but not successful. Personally, I define successfull in relations towards acomplishments that matters for other people as well. Say, if I worked on a project, my project would be coined as 'successful' if it managed to reach the determined target. I might not be successful yet I can still be happy, or vice versa, because I perceive happiness as something much greater than success.
I'm going to have to agree with this.Originally Posted by subterranean
In fact, I think few succeed in being happy.
I suppose someone who genuinely and sincerely feels successful.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Happiness varies. No person is happy always. (Except in religious*/philosophical** way.)
It's a tough world. We're subject to the hardness of life, no matter how well a person manages his life and even his feelings.
(...)--
*in relation with his god(s)
**metaphysically, or in asceticism(s)
I think both happiness and success are as valuable as they are because of our experiences with unhappiness and failure. That is why it is so difficult to define success, because it can only ever have relative,not absolute or universal, value.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I was staying with friends in the country and they asked me to take their dog for a walk. After a while, I passed a house that had a stable attached, and a man came out to break up the fight between his dog and the one I was walking.
We got talking about various things and he was obviously content to lean on the gate and carry on the conversation, but his wife called to him to clean the stable. He sighed and said " I don't mind doing things as long as I don't have to do them." The statement was more profound than her realised. So I would say the successful person is someone who has been able to arrange their life so that they do only what they want to do rather than what they have to.
Last edited by Emil Miller; 02-01-2009 at 07:26 AM.
I couldn't agree more.One is born to fulfill his personal destiny. Being successful is living life the way one wants to live it. The humble carpenter may be as successful (or even more) as the richest CEO if the carpenter considers building houses as his life's work and he's blissfully happy with it.
CARPE DIEM! Seize the day! Make your lives extraordinary!
-Dead Poets' Society
I SWEAR, BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT, THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.
- John Galt, Atlas Shrugged
I disagree. Even a carpenter has to manage daily tasks. He has to put thought on it. If it didn't give you work, it woudn't be work ... Unless you don't think about working. To work has to do with sweating, somewhere. My opinion, though. And it has to do with religious choice.I couldn't agree more.
Speaking of an ancient culture, Romans thought so as well: work, business (negotium) was the opposite of free time (otium). They also had a verb which meant free time dedicated to a discipline (studeo, -es, -ere). So, for someone to be intelectual, back then, he needed to have free time, so as to use it. Nowadays, pleople seem to (be obliged to) make everything at the same time ...
Except successful people~
which doesn't mean they don't work
I think that WE do not measure the value of a person's life -- rather, the individual themself is responsible for their own evaluation. We, as outsiders, can view a person, and based on pure speculation, evaluate that 'that person is successful because they .... ' (measured in our own terms, not necessarily the person in question).
For example, someone who can play Chopin's Ballade No. 4 from memory is someone who would be deemed successful (in my terms). But my hubby would think that that was all in a day's work -- the individual practiced to attain that end. (I believe that too, to a degree, but I have been practicing that one for a few years now, and it is nowhere close to being memorized...) **sigh**
Which leads me to my own definition of 'success'. We have gained success when we feel that by the sweat of our brow, we have attained the goals that we have set for ourselves. We can thus be content and joyful knowing that we have reached for and obtained something in life that was important to us. Of course this would vary for any individual. But to be truly happy with the result of what we have set out to do, well, that is success in my humble opinion.
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty
~Albert Einstein
I think it has to do with being happy with whatever you have to do, and pleased in not having fun all the time. Even for free time there's a limit. As well as there has to be a limit for work also! No man who works all the time can ever be happy! ... Balance is needed.
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