How Can We Define Success?
Ikram Lahmar« He is successful, he has a lot of money ! », « he is a famous man, he is successful ! », « I can not be successful, I am not that rich ! ». People usually relate the fact of being successful to the fact of being rich or famous, considering that if you want to be successful, you ought to have a lot of money.
Well, they have got it all wrong, simply because success have nothing to do with being rich or famous or even both.
« Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with », said Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, « In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are »[1]
But first, how can we define success ? For some, success is having a huge fortune, fancy cars and a big house. For others, success is not having to work all day in order to get paid a little sum of money.
For me, success is when you stand for your dreams and be proud of all the failures and disappointments that crossed your path and of how you overcame them. Success is about dreaming big and going forward to achieve your dreams. Failure is the key to success. No matter how many times someone fails, what matters the most is to stand up again and persue the path of dreams in order to succeed. The world’s most known and inspiring success-stories, according to the video seen during the class, illustrate well the idea.
Oprah Winfrey’s success story is a huge source of inspiration. At a very young age, she had to live with her grand-mother, who could not afford clothes for her. When she moved back with her mother, she was raped by her cousin at the Age of Nine. But, when she was nineteen years old, she became the first black woman under the age of twenty to host in television, unfortunately, she got fired because she was « unfit for the television news ». Despite of all what have happened to her, Oprah did not gave up and followed her dreams. The Oprah Winfrey Show is the proof of her perseverance and hardworking. She is now one of the richest and the most successful people in the world. « The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but on significance - and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning », Oprah Winfrey[2].