What is success?

The world is full of positive definitions built around that one word. 'Success, succeeding, successful'... They have the same term in French, borrowed from English, "succès", even though the French have their own word for it, like "réussite".

Ask anyone around you, they'll all tell you the same thing: success is good. It means you're doing something right... right?

Or is it?

If anything, the notion of success is nothing more than the translation of peer acceptance as to a person and/or an action. In other words, success is nothing but a majority-based agreement that, for better or for worse, decides on whether something is a success or not, or whether a person is successful or not.

But that's easy. Almost anyone could derive such a basic conclusion. The more interesting point to be raised is this: what is the cost of success as the world, or a society, recognises it?

In this modern world, everything is about succeeding in something. It really is, even when one thinks he/she 'only' aims to get a better life by getting a better job, for instance. That means, really, that the strive is to be positively validated by as many people as possible (majority-based agreement) or by a specific group of people within a specific area as found in the notion of 'career' - let's call this a 'niche-based agreement' even though the intrinsic meaning remains the same: the notion of success is absolutely subjective and only exists based on other people agreeing on what it is and whether it exists or not.

How many other words or notions, beliefs or dogmas, rest on such absolutely rooted subjectivity? Quite a lot. In fact, so much so that it would be enough to prove most of the world is built on human illusions stemming, perhaps, from over-developed minds compared to our chimpanzee neighbour.

So what is the cost of success, this one notion that prevails in our world today? The cost seems to be to forsake all other notions or ideals to reach it. This means spending one's existence running blindly after it - therefore doing nothing more than seeking others' validation. The fact that others' validation often brings rewards is often incentive enough to go for it.

We are wired to long for the notion of success from the moment we start going to school at the very least. Tiny children who can't read and count yet are 'innocently' asked to draw pictures and the likes, and then a figure of authority - a marking figure in a child's mind - gathers them all in a nice little circle to elect which one was best, for example. It then gets worse and far more obvious as the children grow up and made to compete for the best grades. Those who seemingly don't care about such things as grades are usually those who have been scarred by a figure of authority at some point or other - be it at home or at school. They may deviate from the norm here, but often will find alternative ways to continue developing the competitive streak in them, such as taking a liking for sports, or even just to beat their friends at whatever game or task. Or even to be the best at simply not doing the 'right' thing, ie: crime, anti-social behaviour. No matter how you look at it, it can always be found rooted in the notion of succeeding over others because success giving way to endless competition to reach it is the prevalent notion from the start.

How can education as we know it not be all about conditioning mind in such ways? Anyone looking back on their time at school would probably agree that most of the testing they had to go through, all these endless grades that were hyped as the most important thing in one's life, actually have no bearing on real life once they become adults. Did it really matter to get a A on that science project when I was 12? What about all the grades I had to study for throughout the year, every year that constituted my education years, when I was made to believe they could make or break me? 99% of them had no use in the real world.

Sure, most could say such techniques as testing are meant to assess learning. That's the lie right there. The lovely subterfuge to allow for the conditioning of minds from the weakest point in time in terms of human consciousness - childhood, where minds are easily moulded and influenced without any notice of it.

A lot of people would be inclined to conclude that being competitive and striving for success is just what we do naturally, because it's part of our make-up, so to speak. But how can this be when the base is already being manipulated, meaning that everything was already set up to encourage us to develop in that way, with very little room for any alternative way of development?

If I were to make a science experiment involving looking at the behaviour of a virus or bacteria under the microscope, but placed in that sample another element that will thwart its natural or innate behaviour, could I be allowed to claim that whatever behaviour I then get to observe is bound to be its natural behaviour? No, I would have to start over with a base sample that removes any external factor that could influence the outcome of that experiment so as to be able to have a basic observation of that entity, and then be able to compare its basic behaviour with the way it adapts when I add external factors.

The same is true with the way we constantly draw conclusions as to who or what we are in essence. We constantly base conclusion on an already spoilt base - meaning we have no chance of truly finding out about what human means unless we stop conditioning ourselves.