Success

We all live on this humble abode of ours. I am referring to our planet earth, just in case you missed out on the humble part. Every day we compete, sometimes with purpose and most of the times without. So it is justified that most of us have a competing spirit within ourselves. We all take pleasure to succeed, but we all feel satisfaction if the success is at the cost of some competitor’s defeat, i.e. by proving that one is better than the lot. And we have to accept the fact that, you can’t be better than someone if that someone isn’t worse than you. Then why all this façade about having no hard feelings and being all peaceful about your failure despite the success of someone close to you. I have seen people break apart from each other even when there was no competition, or rather any scope of any competition in between them apart from paychecks or grades, just due to a difference in the same. This isn’t a tea party folks. So stop pretending to put sugar in the other person’s cup.

I know it is impossible to know beforehand that who shall succeed and up to what extent, hence impossible to judge where one person shall stand with respect to another in a coming span of time. But then, it is equally implausible to maintain the same position before and after an individual’s success. So there has to be scope of adjustment between the two. Something called a “success factor”. Take it to be like the coefficient of friction which you have employed in physics to better understand the negation of forces between two grazing bodies. This “success factor” varies from person to person depending on how big their ego’s are. The more the success factor, the more chances are that the interaction between the two persons shall lead to the crumbling of either, or both. Unless an equal and opposite amount of success exists between the two.

Success in the same direction is also detrimental. Just like the relative velocities of two bodies traveling in the same direction is usually much slower than their individual velocities if their velocities are comparable, similarly when two person have success in the same direction, the one slower often has only one contribution to the one higher- its overall diminution. To such significant contributors only one response is practicable, which shall be imminent from the example I incite here:-

‘In an expedition to climb a mountain, a specific man reached the peak first and much before the rest of the party due to his extra effort and dedication. But when he reached the peak he saw that there were taller peaks all around this particular mountain and this was not the highest point possible. The other people of his party, who were still a good distance behind him, started to point and laugh at him and ridicule him for his extra effort which they thought was futile since the peak wasn’t the highest. But the man only smiled back at them. When they all came back, he was asked the reason for his smile. He calmly said,  “Even to insult me, you had to lean back your head and look up to me, while all the time, I had no other option but to look down upon you or ignore you completely”.’

                Hence, as you can see, success is no bed of roses. Or rather, it is exactly a bed of roses in its complete sense. Looks and smells great, but will prick you to death unless you have a buttock immune to insignificant side thorns.