Elusiveness

With uncertainties brewing in the world by the second, everything that we centered our lives around has become quite elusive to us; our jobs, our social lives; what have you. However, let’s attempt to see another aspect of elusiveness.

Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.

-Steven Spielberg

Mr. Earl Nightingale used to ask a very pertinent question. One, that has troubled the human civilization for generations that have passed and will continue to do so for all of those who have the ability to think. The question was, what is success? I’m not going to be as audacious as to try and answer that question here. Because, come to think of it, success is something that has a different meaning to everyone.

There is no doubt that each and every one of us has a desire to succeed. I don’t think that if asked a question about whether or not we want to succeed in life, anyone would answer in the negative. We all want to succeed. Matter of fact, many of us spend almost the entirety of our lives in order to get to a close shred of success, in whatever field that we desire. However, I’m going to put across a series of questions that made me quite uncomfortable the other day, which I’d like for you to ask yourself.

The first of that series is “Are you a success?”.

I’m hoping there are people who’ll read this and go in the highest of confidence, “Hell yes, I am a success.”, and to them I say good for you! Then, there will be diplomats in our midst, people who’ll say things like, “Oh, I am a work in progress” or “Oh, in a matter of years I’m going to be one”, to those I say, more power to you! But being completely truthful, I’m kinda man enough to admit my doubts of being classified as one. I’m not trying to make myself look bad, I am good at things. But maybe, my standard barrier for success is a little different and I haven’t been able to match that just yet. For people who resonated with my philosophy here, I’m going to try and decrypt this weird notion.

The second question of the series is “Why am I not a success?”.

I’m going to try and generalize success by using well-being as a proxy for it. Well being of the human being is a direct function of four things; happiness, health, wealth and relationships. A very interesting statistic that has been rampantly shared across the globe is that 1% of the world population controls 82% of the global wealth. The skewness is very, very noticeable. This skewness makes the wealth metric of success to be very elusive. To substantiate this, I would like to use yet another statistic. Only 8% of the people actually achieve the goals that they set. Goals that people set are directly tied to cause them benefits in the short or the long run.

The point that I am trying to make here is aptly made by the statement which I have used as a quote in this particular musing. Mr. Steven Spielberg, who can actually be termed a success. Success is elusive.

Here comes the third question of the series, “Why is success so elusive?”.

To answer this one, let’s consider the following. In this world, we have become very used to being connected with everything. Our smart devices, which have made us quite dumb, allow us to access every possible nook and cranny of the world. We can sit in the comfort of our homes and know of the occurrences, events, decisions being made at the most remote areas throughout the globe. What’s much more interesting is that the way these occurrences, events and decisions are presented to us is so engaging that we use our smart devices for over 4 hours a day!

Let’s cut to the chase here. I’m not trying to assign all the blame to smart devices only. The crux of the matter is that we become so tied up in the so called occurrences in our lives and others’,  which I’d term as distractions, that we lose sight of the actual thing, which is the true representation of success for us. Our everyday problems, global outcries and whatnot, cause so much damage to the picture of our victory that even when we achieve something very tiny, which our 10 year old self would barely consider any success, we become contented. This contentment leads to complacency, which causes us to never reach our true potential, what we actually can be!

So, we’ve got to try and be more focused and more strongly oriented towards a standard of success that we determine for ourselves and make sure that we get back on track as soon as we realize that our focus isn’t on the right place! We’ve got to break this trend and not let success get by with the tag of elusiveness that it is so proudly boasting on itself for the past many generations!