The past year in college has changed many ways of thinking for me. It's incredibly nice to be surrounded by people who don't mind debating my opinion with rebuttals to their own. These ideas shed a new light on me that allows for growth.
Winning to me has always been the indication of success. The competitive vibe I fuel makes me believe that, if I am the winner, then I have succeeded. Even the definition of winning mentions success. However, that's not the case. Winning is not success, but success is winning. Let me use the best of my ability to explain what I mean.
Winning the lottery, winning races, winning competitions, scholarships, anything that can be won, generally makes a person happy. This emotion of happiness is then linked to being successful, because success, also makes an individual happy. When you win something, have you achieved success? or have you obtained something that other people competed to have as well? I know I feel happy whenever I win over someone else. But, when I don't, I am confronted by my failure. Then I often allow this failure to catapult be backwards so that I have to start over and rethink my game plan. Yet, no mater how many times I rethought and moved forward, failure always managed to swing me back to the origin. It really frustrated me. I was depressed and oppressed by my own failure. I felt like every time I won, I was taking steps forward and moving further away from the catapult so that it couldn't reach me. Yet, it always managed to swing me back no matter what coordinate I stood at. Where was I going wrong?
I didn't want to win, I wanted to succeed. I had placed winning and success as equivalent entities when they have their distinct differences. I believed that: To reach success, is to win everything and anything. This was rather an unhealthy train of though I was boarding. I was so deep into the idea that I would be eternally happy if I kept winning. As if to win was the gasoline fueling my sport car of success, but it wasn't. It was the diesel for trucks, not the gas for my car. (Yes, my metaphors are odd. I apologize).
It's finally clicked now, that winning is winning and success is success. To win is to win against others. It's the constant competition of who is better and the best. Winning is something that can be quantified. This does not identify what success is. Success, to me, is to reach the state of mind that you are happy with yourself. Success is when you have found the path home even after being catapulted miles back to your original starting point. Where home, is the destination to something that you love more than you love yourself. It's the ideology that you are genuinely happy with the person you are and the drive to move forward. To be a successful person is a quality, not a quantity.
-Also, Happy October.
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