Everyone wants to be successful- you included, that I’m certain.
But what does “being successful” really mean? Does it mean being in the top 1% in terms of income, wealth, status, job title, school ranking even?
Before we move forward onto answering that, I would first like to bring up a definition- the very definition of success.
By definition, success is the positive outcome of an attempt. It is incredibly short and simple- yet success can range from being extremely feasible to being extremely unattainable- depending on what you have defined your ‘attempt’ as.
I am stating the obvious. Yet most people haven’t the foggiest idea what success itself really means. So they try to describe it with possible characteristics of a successful person, like “having a sizeable house” or “being at the top of the corporate ladder” or “being in the top 10% in terms of wealth”.
It is only normal, because when people are asked about what being successful means, they picture a successful person and the person’s characteristics come to mind, which forms a stereotype.
The “success” we generally talk about in society is qualitative (therefore it can only be observed, recorded, and approximated) because someone can be “quite successful”, “not very successful”, “very successful”, or “successful”, which does not really mean much.
However, if we categorize the outcomes of an attempt as positive and negative, we end up with only 2 categories. This allows us to define “success” with only 2 outcomes, either successful or unsuccessful. Successful being the positive outcome, and unsuccessful being the negative outcome.
By doing this, success becomes quantitative, which means it can now be measured.
“Success is the positive outcome of an attempt.” Or simply, it is achieving what you have set out to do. Therefore, everyone should have a different definition of success and it should not be generalized.
In order to use this definition, we now have to define the attempt and categorize the outcomes as positive and negative. The latter part is easy to do. For the former, we will simply define it as your goal.