Aug 3, 2009

The Notion Of Success



Quite a few people, especially my relatives regard me as a highly successful person...Maybe because of these NIT , IIM tags, may be because of a relatively well - off academic credentials etc.. Somehow I get irritated when people talk to me with such a kind of perspective..

Let me confess - I'm someone who has missed achieving 90 % of what I aimed at in terms of academics.. Even when my parents talk to my brothers preaching them to aim at my academic credentials, I'm least impressed... Because for me, the notion of success is something higher.. I'm happy at what I'm... But I don't think anyone should aim at my career / acad levels and try to match those .. Because I see higher pedestals of what we can call as success .

At every point in life, I had this habit of trying to match myself to people whom i thought were the 'role models of success' ... I could not emulate most of them..But as a strange turnaround, I often saw that, those people whom I benchmarked as successful in one stage , didnt do very well in the subsequent stage of life...Like there were people - seeing whose performace in the IIT entrance exams and all I thought 'these were highest manifestations of success and its them that I should try to emulate' .. I had this habit of tracking the life of people like these either from the net or through some acquaintances... And I happened to learn that many of them didnt perform pretty well in their engineering college life...maybe they were in a wrong place , maybe circumstances were different ..etc... But whatever be it, success in one stage is neither a pre-requisite , nor a guarantee that you will be successful in the subsequent stage..

Same case repeated during engineering life ..Some of the people whom I thought could be marked as role models, cutout a sorry figure for themselves in professional life... In the sense , the DNA of success was something different for each stage.. Same with CAT & IIMs...Some of the guys who used to ace mock tests & CAT , I hear , have fared badly in IIMs ( not just academically... but in many aspects ) .. And if we include the realm of personal life , the picture again gets murkier...Many of these academic stars have had pretty bad personal lives...Many ppl who have happy personal life are nowhere near academic success..
I know I might sound a bit crazy, but still can't help... 'Is there an absolute measure for success ?? ' .

4 comments:

Rahul said...

Nice post Ajith! One of those questions life throws up only after a sense of maturity has been achieved :P

Anonymous said...

According to me, all these tags are just tags for people to benchmark you, and for you to gloat in your ego. (if you are that kind of person)

Something which I've learned from working for 4 years is that success cannot be benchmarked. Of course, there are somethings like the fact that I'm sad that I didn't get a trade I wanted in IIT.

eternalmonotony said...

Solution for me lies in getting out of the mad benchmarking habit. We look at good things people do in different facets of life, and learn from them. And aim to better specific aspects of our own lives. But the focus should always be us, and not anyone else, and hence remain more or less satisfied and at peace. I daresay you are one who comes close to achieving that goal.

Sreejith Kumar said...

Seeking an absolute answer this query may force you to belive in astrology... :) The only thing that everybody would accept is that there are no short-cuts to it.