Success
One defintion: “The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted”
How boring.
Life’s unpredictability is what makes it so much more beautiful. Why do we (I) insist on attempting to control it? If we ‘succeeded’ we would only limit our experience to what we can imagine. I’m glad we fail sometimes.
Success is boring? Or just that definition of success?
Achieving a goal has an intrinsic beauty of its own.
Succeeding sets our beautiful lives in motion. It makes us feel alive. And in this, helps us mine the depths of imagination within us.
ambrosimus
June 5, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Just that definition; by which I find success reassuring at best, boring at worst.
I’m trying to say that failure can also be exhilarating, perhaps even more so than success since it shows us things we didn’t imagine.
Do you really find that success (the outcome) makes you feel alive? Or is it anticipation?
The experience of my doing my Masters made me feel far more alive than finishing it; I haven’t even bothered to graduate. Failing a programming subject during my Bachelors was a massively positive experience, but that’s a post for another day.
Abhijit
June 5, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Admittedly, I find that success, failure and the journey along either path make me feel alive.
Importantly though, I challenge that success can be much more then reassurance. It is not success that limits the imagination at all. Rather it can be the catalyst which opens up new possibilities
(Biased ;] ) Case in point; a computer game
You start at level 1. You find that by adapting, learning, earning experience and reasoning you move on to a higher level which unlocks some special power, opening up a new way to play.
Failing that programming subject may have been a positive experience. But the success of eventually achieving your bachelor degree was at least equivalently so. It gave site-unseen credibility to your resume, allowing you to be elevated to the status of an IT professional.
ambrosimus
June 6, 2007 at 7:18 pm