Definition of Success
[Music]
like a lot of you out there
i’ve lost at a lot of things i’ve lost
at numerous robotics competitions
and to science olympiad now this might
all sound really bad
but believe me when i say i’ve learned a
lot from all this
when i lost at science olympiad i told
myself i gave him my best shot
i thought about what i could do better
and i moved on
i decided that next year i won’t hold
off on my project until the very last
minute
when i lost it was disappointing yes but
it didn’t make me feel like a failure
or like i was worthless i know some of
you out there know exactly what i’m
talking about
now this mindset that i have is
partially in thanks to the way that my
parents brought me up they taught me
that just because you fail
that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a
failure
had i been taught differently though i
might have believed something else
i might have believed that i was a
failure or that i might not even be
successful
but based on what we all want to be
successful that’s a given
but what does success itself really mean
to me
success means accomplishment but
if you turn on the tv you’ll hear every
single news anchor imaginable talking
about
a young man who sold billions upon
billions of dollars off of an insane new
product that no one’s ever seen before
or how a young poor man sold all of his
belongings and now lives in a mansion
either way whenever we hear about
success any form of media really
it’s usually through money and we’ve
heard this for so often
and for so long that now we’ve come to
stereotype money as what it means to
succeed
and if this were true that would mean
that say if you love your job as a
barber
but you can barely pay your bills on
time you failed
and if you hate your job as a computer
salesman but you make 300 000
a year you succeeded you see the problem
with this
no matter where you go people will say
that you have to have money in order to
be successful
but that’s not entirely true in fact a
study in 2018 by purdue university
found out that once you hit around the
60 000 mark
for your income which is around middle
class
then money stops affecting how happy you
are
the very idea that money is not success
was actually implemented
into the carbon neutral country of
bhutan bhutan
is different from the rest of the world
in that they don’t measure the success
and wealth through gdp
gdp or gross domestic product is the way
almost every single country in the world
tells you how well
he may tell you all this it won’t tell
you how your country is how your country
feels
so what bhutan does instead is use
something called the happiness index
what this does is instead of measuring
wealth this measures how each citizen
feels towards their country
and measures the collective happiness of
their nation
through this they have become the
world’s first carbon neutral country in
the world
carbon neutral if you don’t know means
that every single drop of carbon dioxide
that goes into the atmosphere
there they’re able to bring it right
back down because the amount of trees
they have in their country
this is only possible because the amount
of public support they had for this
project
you see they put the welfare of their
citizens first
instead of their economy and they are
doing very well because of it
so tying this all back to what it means
to succeed
success is meant to be open-ended it’s
not meant to have one set definition
success could mean finishing a race even
though you know you might not win it
could mean giving your trial to contest
it could mean something as simple as
baking a cake
and sometimes success isn’t as cut and
dry as you want it to be
i know from experience for example when
i was checking my band placement results
i was disappointed to see that i didn’t
make varsity band
but i was happy to see that i also made
first chair in junior varsity band
which is really really good would you
consider this a failure
not if you measured it by the way that i
felt i felt that i did my best
and that made me feel proud so in the
end
it doesn’t matter if you fail by someone
else’s standards
what matters is that you did your best
what matters is that you feel satisfied
because when you do that’s when you know
you’re really successful
thank you
you