What is Success? 

By Cozette Calderon 

As I age, I become more aware that there seems to be more and more goals that need to be met in order for society to consider one to be a successful person. It seems that success can be represented as a pyramid. At the top is the word ‘success.’ Below are many sub categories: education, family, happiness, career, wealth, and appearance. Beneath each category are sub-categories, and if you’re able to reach the very bottom of each category, you are deemed successful. 

Recently, I’ve been questioning words: what do they really mean? If I am to use a word to define myself, I should first decide how I apply the word. All words have a meaning, yet over time they develop to be used in different ways, allowing people to interpret the words differently. Words evolve from only a denotation to having a connotation. 

Success is applied most often to winning. Say you win an award for 1st place. That’s deemed an achievement, so you are successful. You cannot be successful without accomplishing something. First comes an accomplishment or an achievement (simply completing a task, goal, or event), then success follows. Success is an idea that means one did a great job, and it can be described as a feeling that bubbles after an accomplishment. If we were to win second place, we would most likely feel that yearning for first. We feel that second place isn’t as much of a successful accomplishment as first is. What people fail to mention is that, technically, we successfully got an award for 2nd place. We use the word ‘successfully’ to mean an ending to something that was a goal. So, if you aimed for 2nd place, we successfully got second place. Does that mean if we won first place, we weren’t successful? Is success only based on our goals set? I argue no. First place is better than second, and success is applied to an accomplishment. Winning first place is a success but separate from your original goal. 

What is the point of trying to decide what I can deem a success? Deciding the word’s limit, limits the pain of losing or of not being successful. Often, as humans, we fall into self-doubt. As soon as we see others do something we deem successful, we yearn to be able to comment about our success. When someone mentions a good grade on a test, we bring up our own. It takes humility to bring up a bad test grade. I’m not condemning anyone for not bringing up something they deem as a loss, but this example I’ve presented is simply an explanation for why I became interested in the word ‘success’. 

The most rational reasoning will say that success holds multiple different meanings. I agree, but most people don’t consider the multiple uses of the word success, and it leads to disappointment and dissatisfaction. Sometimes, people simply won’t be successful, and we should acknowledge the hurt and the reality of each situation. Still, we have power over our words, and, most importantly, which words we apply to each situation. 

1. The completion of something. 

Success can be applied to the ending of something. An event is deemed a success because the person wanted the event to end, and it did. That was a “win” or a good thing. Think of a marathon. Someone wouldn’t consider walking 3 steps a success, instead one would consider finishing the marathon a success because that’s the preset goal. Still, some would say success alters based on one’s perspective. If the person who took three steps in the marathon considered that their goal, they could be deemed successful because they accomplished that goal.

Some might argue that not all endings are successful or even good. In one sense, as long as the end was the goal, it was a success. When it comes to personal perspective, one might not view losing a world war as a success on the side of the losers, but the winning side will. This leads to the fact there’s a personal side to deciding what is a success. A murderer could consider killing someone successful because that was their goal. However, to a reasonable person, killing someone would not make one successful. However, one could still use the word successful and mean it. We can think of it like this: the murderer wanted to kill someone, and he did, so he is successful with that deed. However, as a societal norm he should be shunned because the goal of murdering someone should not be deemed as an accomplishment because it is morally wrong. So the action was successful, but the person was not. Such a case seems to be an exception. Again, people associate success with “good” things, so the chances someone uses the word “successful” may be limited, but still, the word is applicable. 

     These examples show three things. Firstly, success depends on which side you’re experiencing the situation from (meaning, the word affects you based on your personal beliefs). Secondly, some might say that regardless of your personal emotions surrounding a situation, the ending is still a success because the ending is a completion. 

If one wants the situation to end, regardless of how, the situation ending is successful. 

Thirdly, success is relative. What is a success for you, is a tragedy for someone else, but what is a decent success for you, is a major success for someone else. 

2. We change focus. 

We place the word successful with a positive connotation because of its denotation. According to Cambridge Dictionary, success means “the achieving of desired results, or someone or something that achieves positive results.” If we place value on a situation or event, and we complete that event with positive outcomes, it is a success. Does this mean an ending with no positive outcome at all is successful? I argue, yes, as long as the ending was the goal. Regardless of the outcome, the ending is still a success because the ending was the goal and that goal was complete. Looking at the good outcomes, sometimes it is hard to achieve the exact outcomes we originally wanted. 

     After losing, we often try to justify the loss. We try to look at other successes and leave the loss out of the equation. How do we make up for lost success? We create goals that we achieved in the past, even if we didn’t place goals on the accomplishment at the time. This is what I mean: during a debate competition, my team’s goal was to win one debate. We succeeded in the first round. After, our goal was to win a total of two. My partner and I succeeded. From there we didn’t make a goal until winning our third debate. We wanted to move on to elimination rounds. We succeeded. The following day, when the competition continued, we lost in the very first round and were eliminated. 

  Prior to the elimination round, we decided our goal was to win two elimination rounds. We did not achieve that, missing the after-feeling of success, and immediately we started commenting on our prior wins and how we accomplished our previous goals.

 In this way, we alter success by stating what we want the word to fit. We ignore the “successful” thing that we didn’t actually accomplish, and instead we create past accomplishments based on finished products, and then feel the following success. However, we rarely focus on the smaller events that can be considered successful. In this way, we cut ourselves off from self confidence or pride because we only place success in the big accomplishments. 

3. The value of something flexes. 

This leads to the biggest idea of what success is and why it hurts. We place the term “success” as a good thing because we apply it to situations that provide us happiness or pride, since the definition of success does state “desirable results.” Of course as soon as we set a goal and miss it, it will hurt because we set a desire or standard for ourselves to reach and miss. It leads us to the question: Am I good enough to succeed? The idea of failing for any reason is deemed terrible. We place the word success on things worth high-value, and by doing so we raise the “price” of the word. Simply put, the success of winning a national level tournament compared to winning a game of tic-tac-toe is drastically different. The “more important” things, the higher in value items, are the things that get deemed a success if completed, and if they’re not we’re often left upset or unsatisfied. We don’t get an ‘F’ on the test and immediately say, “I failed that, but I was successful at waking up this morning.” The question is: Should we say this?

Should we fix this pain we feel after failing? There are two trains of thought: 

Viewing the word ‘success’ through a realistic and, perhaps, tougher lens produces the idea that the pain of losing is normal and simply should be accepted rather than softened or eased. We reserve words for different situations, and we should keep them that way. If we ever want to actually reach the goal we set, we need the motivation, which comes from not being successful sometimes. The little stuff (doing the laundry, cooking, cleaning) is normal and shouldn’t be given the “honor” of being successful. One should simply do the small stuff because it’s part of life and move on. 

The other train of thought is that we can still view the little things in life as successes, which won’t cheapen the price of the big wins, but may allow one to be more kind to oneself. It’s not everyday one wins a national level tournament, but people wake up everyday and do activites like laundry, dishes, homework, etc. Perhaps within those mundane tasks, we find a goal waiting to be deemed a success. How could waking up ever be deemed a success? Well, previously I mentioned we place the word success side by side with “accomplishment.” An accomplishment is the end of a challenging task. If getting out of bed is hard to do for someone, it’s an accomplishment that they did it and should be considered a success, meaning they are a successful person because they accomplished a hard goal for themselves.

I also want to mention that success and being a successful person can be turned into a separate discussion–one that requires another article. 

When we look at the word success, it is not my intention to try and change language. Language has developed how it has for a reason, and we should not be obliged to change word’s meanings for personal gain or emotional comfort. Simply apply words exactly as they are from the dictionary and what they truly mean or represent. However, we choose how words affect us. What is success? It’s the feeling we should get after we achieve something—big or little. Success follows after what little or big things you’re willing to apply the word to. Personally, not being successful means I failed, but it also means I simply have to try again.