Becoming successful as a new year’s resolution: A misunderstood concept.
It’s the age-old question, “How do you see yourself in five years?”. There hasn’t been an answer that I have been satisfied with, much less one that the person asking has been satisfied with.
One answer always comes to mind, but I always restrain myself from saying it out loud: “being a successful person.”
This should be a reasonable answer because it encompasses achieving your goals and striving for the best outcome in your endeavors. However, there is one caveat; it has become synonymous with a phony businessman who achieves fame, wealth, and everything he wants in life but is hollow inside. It’s likely that you’ve seen a holiday movie with that theme recently. Sure enough, I did.
Searching for an image of a “successful person” will reveal a wide range of poses, backgrounds, and activities involving people in suits, or an artistic photograph of a backed-out silhouette against a picturesque backdrop.
I asked artificial intelligence for that image, using the infamous DALL-E. This is the result:
I bet you had a version of the same image in mind. I wrote the preceding paragraph before the search, and boy, was I frighteningly right.
There is a famous quote by Albert Einstein that says,
“Try Not To Become a Man of Success, But Rather Try To Become a Man of Value.”
The meaning behind this quote, also exposes a certain truth as to why the word “success” has become askew. Becoming successful implies that you are wishing for this outcome, and to a certain degree you are leaving to chance and luck the achievement of success. On the other hand, becoming a person of value infers that you act in a valuable manner and, as a result, you achieve the desired outcome by virtue of process and not of serendipity.
Your definition of success and what constitutes a successful outcome should only depend on how you define it, but you should always keep in mind that success is an outcome of your actions, not your wishes.
The key to success is effort, determination, continuous learning, and purposefully acting in accordance with our values, goals, and objectives.
