Antonym of Success

I think the problem with the perception of success is not the act of being successful. It is more to do with the perception of being unsuccessful or a failure. Here is the interesting part, none of these labels is self-proclaimed, on the contrary, they are inflicted by society and are an ongoing process.

Right from the time a child is born or even before, we start labelling. First to speak, first to walk, the kind of look, the colour, the sharpness, the shyness, we are busy compartmentalizing. In this scheme of putting children into compartments parents sometimes volunteer to compete on those grounds.

I remember meeting a mother of a peppy 10 years old only to hear her mother complain about how thin she was. Another father with a 9-year daughter whose vocabulary sometimes gives me a feeling of mediocrity complains about her being fat. It is not that the parents are not proud of their child’s accomplishments, however highlighting what could only be seen as a problem area is the first step in deciding how they would perceive their success. As children, we often strive for standards that are set by someone else. Standards that they wanted to achieve or think is right under the given circumstances. Bottom line, as a child, we keep aspiring for goals and stuff that others decide for us on the measures that others give us, under the circumstance that others create for us.

Not all the times these circumstances or aspirations work against us. It is only when they fail to do what they are meant to do that we realize we have a concern. A 13-year-old aspires to be a doctor has no inclination to study medicine. Then why does he aspire to become a doctor? Because somewhere in experience he felt that to earn the love of his parents he needs to say that.

Where does this stop? One would think that this will stop once the child enters adulthood and gains the maturity to make independent decisions. But the perception of self stays throughout.

According to Professor Covington from SA College of Applied Psychology, once we attach our self-worth to our marks, our appearance or popularity we fail to see ourselves as human being and failures as experience.

This carries on for our lives where we become a net sum of successes or failures. It, unfortunately, becomes math and we move from one experience to other with that myopic view.

Is there a way in we break this view. I asked myself a question some 15 years back. Who am I? I had recently been married so was under pressure, not explicit but implied to change my last name. I had strongly associated myself with my job and training and education but was taking a break for some time. None of it mattered. My relations as a daughter/of on papers been changed to wife/of. I was happy that I still had my intellectual faculties intact till a few years later thanks to a drug reaction when I had a problem with that too albeit for a little while.

At that moment I realized that everything that I define myself with can just vanish or taken away. The minute one realizes the fragility of life, it can set them free. Once I realized that I do not need to define myself it helped me decide where from there.  

One doesn’t need to go through these experiences for an epiphany. But at some point in time, we do need to realize that we all come with choices. Choices to rewrite the definitions of success and maybe get into loggerheads with the next generation for our own skewed version of it. But one thing is for sure. We need to strengthen our vocabulary to ensure that new antonym of success is learning.