Sunday, May 31, 2009

Types of Successes

While I was introspecting and contemplating meaninglessly, as I often do, I realized...
As I see, from my own meandering experiences that there are two types of people categorized based on how they see and measure their personal successes.


0. People whose success is relative
They measure their success ONLY relative to someone else's. Their success is enjoying/earning/having relatively superior things/opportunities/luck when compared to someone else. In simpler terms, they feel successful if someone else is unsuccessful. If they cannot succeed, more often than not, they want their peers (with whom they compare their success for relativity) to fail. They just want to be relatively successful, and, as with everything else in life, they take the path of least resistance: Think bad for someone. They want someone to plummet in the deepest trenches of hopelessness, so that they feel successful in spite of being not-so-successful. They are successful only when someone else isn't. Their happiness (which is directly linked to success) is pivoted on someone else being unhappy. It is sad to see that the world is infested with this type.

Though exotic, rare and hard to find, there is second category:

1. People whose success is absolute
They DO NOT compare their successes to anything or anybody else's. They use someone's success as a metric, as a comparison point, and then aim to go beyond that. And the only way they want to go beyond that is by elevating themselves to that level, and not by degrading the comparison point. In my view, these people are the true champions in life.

Cannot resist quoting beautiful lines from the 'Sunscreen' song:

Don't waste your time on jealousy;
Sometimes you are ahead, sometimes you are behind...
The race is long, and in the end its only with yourself.

The sooner you realize this, the more time you shall have to enjoy TRUE success.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice quote

Indrani said...

a good read... :)

Valkyrie Savage said...

so which are you? ;) I like to think that, with effort, anyone can make his mark on the world. that may be for better or for worse, but anyone can do it if he isn't chained by this "relative success" idea.

The Shaolin said...

@Val: That's a nice question. And I'll leave that to your judgment :)