Success: A Falacious Ideal

Success is a problematic goal. The word "success" itself acts as an absolute. According to the explicit English lexicon, you can either be successful or unsuccessful. You can't interpret success in varying degrees--again, according to the dictionary definition. Although the same could be said about other attributes that are dependant upon our human judgment (i.e. ugly and beautiful, fat and skinny, smart and stupid), success is a nebulous deviation from these other classifications.

We will take first the category of weight. I will not focus on scientific measurement because those in and of themselves could be argued, I guess. I wouldn't argue them, but someone would. I will concentrate on aggregate perception. If a man (in this and subsequent cases, I will use "man" so as not to sound sexist) is overweight, and you ask 100 people if he is overweight, an overwhelming majority of them will say that he is. If a man is ugly, a majority of people will say that he is ugly (or at least unattractive). There will always be the few who think that overexaggerated features (such as a kaiser roll-sized nose) are unduly becoming, but the aggregate opinion will lean towards the side of "dang, that ugly!" However, success is different. There will never be a majority opinion because the proverbial tape measure used to quantify it is existentially relative.

A most basic definition of success is "someone better off than me." In other words, you define what determines success. Within that definition, there are constantly variable categories of success: money, family, position with God, pairs of shoes, number of children, record of the football team (which is the way we Boiseans measure success ... Go Broncos! 13-0, baby!), etc. I don't think that we can label anyone who is better than us in these categories (whichever ones we use as our "tape measure") as unsuccessful. For example, I do not feel successful yet because I do not have a college degree. Therefore, anyone who has a college degree is successful. Once I have a college degree, the tables will turn. Then, anyone without a college degree is unsuccessful and anyone with a college degree and a job will be successful. Once I have a job, the unemployed will be unsuccessful and those with a higher-paying job than mine are successful. And so it goes.

If we were to say that those underneath us in any given category are successful, we are saying that we have already crossed the plane of success and are far above it. In other words, we have already achieved success. If we are successful, then why progress? After all, since success is absolute, we have nowhere to go. After all, if God had intended us to somehow achieve beyond success, why didn't he give us the word "successfuller"?

This is admittedly an oversimplified "success model," but the principle is true. And it's vicious. We cannot let our happiness be dependant upon our success or else we will never attain either of the two. We can never be successful, but only closer to success than we were yesterday. That's what I'm trying to do. If my goal were success, then failure would be my only option. And failure hurts like a well-executed wedgie.