The Inertia of Intent
In life, I believe ambition can be boiled down to two different types of motivation: Having the intent to exceed the circumstances from which you came, or being content to stay where you started.
My thinking is that the more you had as a kid, the more you have to have as an adult to feel successful in surpassing the standards that have been set for you. And in turn, the less you had as a kid, the less it would seem you have to do to exceed the expectations.
Yet, that’s completely unfair comparison.
It’s proportional, right? The bar might seem lower from somebody else’s point of view, but in reality, it’s just as difficult or challenging to reach. Because it’s still the same X amount beyond the starting point Y, which is a vastly different starting point relative to that of another person.
Thus, it’s an unnecessarily frustrating exercise to compare ourselves to another person. But it seems natural that we compare ourselves to our parents, because that’s what we know best.
For a person whose parents didn’t go to school, getting a college degree would feel like achieving success. For a person whose parents made a cool million dollars, maybe being successful means making ten million dollars. Who knows? More importantly, who cares?
In terms of socioeconomic background, coming from less or more seems to be irrelevant. No matter where people came from, they will always struggle with and against what they had or didn’t have.
Eventually, we all have to realize that the bar is not measured against our parents, but against ourselves.
Point being, success cannot be defined by anybody else. Not our parents, not our friends, and not our society at large. Truly successful people are the ones who know exactly what success means to them as an individual. Simply because the only person who can know whether or not you are truly successful is, well, YOU. Only you know what metrics of success to use.
Yet maybe this is why the people who originally set out to prevail over what they came from often go on to keep achieving. The inertia of intent stays constant even after it evolves from eclipsing their upbringing into surmounting where they are currently. They are driven to keep working towards success, even as their definition of success continues to change.
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I think success at life means being able to die and know that you lived a fulling life even with all the errors/unfairness/back-stabs/etc through out it.
But as far as the article I completely agree, tho as the way society is today more people tend to follow the group think idea of what success is. Kinnda sad really.
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I definitely agree that part of the drive comes from ones upbringing. While they don't directly dictate the definition of success they certainly go a long way in shaping what we believe success is.
One thing I would say is that failure is not supported in Western societies as much as it should be. Making mistakes is often one of the best ways to discovering a better way of doing things that otherwise would not have been found. Schools, universities and the general society at large all place a massive emphasis on "winning" on "achieving" and more importantly "never failing", but sometimes those mistakes make us stronger, make us better and more importantly remind us we are human, provided we learn from them and don't ignore them.
We ignore history at our own peril.
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