What Is Success?

When you're growing up, and you think about what you want to do, people say if you work hard enough, you will succeed. So what do you consider yourself if you work that hard your entire life, and despite all your hard work, you still cannot succeed? Are you a failure? Do you just need to work harder? Or is there another factor that no one ever tells you about because it is so discouraging to know how it is to your success that knowing that there is an element you can't control can discourage you.

I am talking, of course, about other people. To make it even more discouraging, it isn't just other people, it is the right people. You can be the top of your field. Better than Einstein. Better than da Vinci. Better than Mozart. Better than Spielberg. You could have ideas and works that could change the world forever. You could run the country better than any leader in its history. But if you don't know the right people, it will never happen.

It is all a matter of pure luck, really. Most of the world's success stories rely just as much on the right place at the right time with the right person as much as they do the hard work and talent of the individual. Some of those stories could have just as easily ended in an arrest as they did in success. Those are the lengths to which people have gone to achieve their goals.

Success is like a chain where one link leads directly to the next but like a chain, where is the first link? People love to have been the first to know something after it gets big, but they never want to go first on something new.

What does this mean for you? Just an acknowledgement. Success is hard work, make no mistake about it. You have to possess the talent to make something of yourself in any field.

But it is just as much finding the right ear to hear you.