On success
After an overload of quotations and personal stories on Facebook and TED talks on YouTube that discuss of success, I have realized something about the broad picture, the perspective that only internet and people full of themselves can provide. I am just kidding.
I am not talking about stupid senseless illegitimate things you find in Calibri with a background of the sunset on a beach. I am talking about genuine advice, from proven successful people. I want to point out the flaw in them.
If you watch enough of these, you will find examples that are contradicting, exact antonyms in the literal sense. Some would say start your day early, wake up, make your bed, do your stuff and sleep at 9. And then you will see examples and studies that find nocturnal people are more successful. Some would say 10 hours of sleep is the key, some would say 5.
To be honest, I didn't really have the aforementioned crapload of videos or personal stories, they actually make me cringe and I try to scroll past them with a speed you apply on getting out of porn suggestions in your google autocomplete. They present already searched queries in a different color. Who came up with that? Anyway, I confess not because of my conscience but because you will eventually realize my lack of examples or simple inaccuracies in them. I was actually having a discussion with someone about this topic.
Before I continue, I should mention I am using the literal meaning of the word success - accomplishment of the aim. I hope this would come to you as a slight realization, not of anything new, but of a dormant understanding.
Chance does play a role in it, but I believe it is worthless to talk or critically think about it. By definition I mean. It really is something that is not in your control, outside the bounds of your action. But some people - and this is only on account of language and understanding - think that you can make your own luck, or increase the chances of success, but then you are really talking about chance as a derived attribute of something else, an effect not a cause. In either case it doesn't make sense to take it into consideration.
Okay, so the broad picture, the realization that I had was the complexities of factors and attributes responsible and the difficulty to understand them. The end... Just kidding.
But some people really do talk about derived attributes, not the fundamental ones. For instance, CEO of major companies only sleep four hours a day. And you have this sudden guilt that you do ten. But it doesn't mean you should start sleeping for 4 hours. They have a reason they do that. They are compelled to do that. Do you really have those days when you think there are not enough hours in a day. If that happens, naturally and dictated by your priorities, you will eventually start sleeping for only four hours.
Then, you have the context missing from some of it, specially Facebook stories and quotations. There is an argument about political theories (I think from a book called Idiocy of Idealism, which I wasn't really ready for, and would have to reread some day) that proponents of socialism or capitalism miss out on the fact that policies also rely on the current state of the society. Your final state depends on the algorithm and the initial state of the system. If you fail to account for it, stuff goes wrong. So you cannot blindly apply things - you need to have a deep understanding of their life and motives, and again, ability to extract fundamental qualities, rather than what they did. I mean if you fail ninety nine times there is no chance you will succeed on your hundredth attempt if you hadn't paid attention when they were teaching the electricity chapter in your school.
All of this makes it difficult to analyse arguments on success. Therefore, it is difficult to come up with sufficient set of attributes. But on the positive side, I think I have figured out the necessary subset of attributes. There are couple of qualities that are just by definition of the word success. These are absolute, axioms, not dependent on anything else. A slight derivation would be required to call them in a single word, to a more commonplace known human quality, but those too are pretty direct and based on definitions.
So to achieve 'accomplishment of the aim', you really need to have one. That is, have a good understanding and clarity about it. Not the effects like money and fame, but the direct goal. Money and fame are too abstract to aim for.
And the other trivial thing is that you need to do work to achieve it. Only a slight extension is to do work until you achieve it. That is just by definition.
I don't have a word for the first one, but the latter is called Perseverance.
I am not talking about stupid senseless illegitimate things you find in Calibri with a background of the sunset on a beach. I am talking about genuine advice, from proven successful people. I want to point out the flaw in them.
If you watch enough of these, you will find examples that are contradicting, exact antonyms in the literal sense. Some would say start your day early, wake up, make your bed, do your stuff and sleep at 9. And then you will see examples and studies that find nocturnal people are more successful. Some would say 10 hours of sleep is the key, some would say 5.
To be honest, I didn't really have the aforementioned crapload of videos or personal stories, they actually make me cringe and I try to scroll past them with a speed you apply on getting out of porn suggestions in your google autocomplete. They present already searched queries in a different color. Who came up with that? Anyway, I confess not because of my conscience but because you will eventually realize my lack of examples or simple inaccuracies in them. I was actually having a discussion with someone about this topic.
Before I continue, I should mention I am using the literal meaning of the word success - accomplishment of the aim. I hope this would come to you as a slight realization, not of anything new, but of a dormant understanding.
Chance does play a role in it, but I believe it is worthless to talk or critically think about it. By definition I mean. It really is something that is not in your control, outside the bounds of your action. But some people - and this is only on account of language and understanding - think that you can make your own luck, or increase the chances of success, but then you are really talking about chance as a derived attribute of something else, an effect not a cause. In either case it doesn't make sense to take it into consideration.
Okay, so the broad picture, the realization that I had was the complexities of factors and attributes responsible and the difficulty to understand them. The end... Just kidding.
But some people really do talk about derived attributes, not the fundamental ones. For instance, CEO of major companies only sleep four hours a day. And you have this sudden guilt that you do ten. But it doesn't mean you should start sleeping for 4 hours. They have a reason they do that. They are compelled to do that. Do you really have those days when you think there are not enough hours in a day. If that happens, naturally and dictated by your priorities, you will eventually start sleeping for only four hours.
Then, you have the context missing from some of it, specially Facebook stories and quotations. There is an argument about political theories (I think from a book called Idiocy of Idealism, which I wasn't really ready for, and would have to reread some day) that proponents of socialism or capitalism miss out on the fact that policies also rely on the current state of the society. Your final state depends on the algorithm and the initial state of the system. If you fail to account for it, stuff goes wrong. So you cannot blindly apply things - you need to have a deep understanding of their life and motives, and again, ability to extract fundamental qualities, rather than what they did. I mean if you fail ninety nine times there is no chance you will succeed on your hundredth attempt if you hadn't paid attention when they were teaching the electricity chapter in your school.
All of this makes it difficult to analyse arguments on success. Therefore, it is difficult to come up with sufficient set of attributes. But on the positive side, I think I have figured out the necessary subset of attributes. There are couple of qualities that are just by definition of the word success. These are absolute, axioms, not dependent on anything else. A slight derivation would be required to call them in a single word, to a more commonplace known human quality, but those too are pretty direct and based on definitions.
So to achieve 'accomplishment of the aim', you really need to have one. That is, have a good understanding and clarity about it. Not the effects like money and fame, but the direct goal. Money and fame are too abstract to aim for.
And the other trivial thing is that you need to do work to achieve it. Only a slight extension is to do work until you achieve it. That is just by definition.
I don't have a word for the first one, but the latter is called Perseverance.
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