Ambition and Success

How can one define ambition?

How do we measure success?

From what I have seen in the Indian context at least, ambition and goals are built by parents, peers and society. For example it was always certain that the students with higher percentages in the tenth board exams would opt for Science followed by Commerce and Arts.

Doesn't India need good students in commerce and arts, I wondered.

Then almost all students in the Maths-Science section wanted to appear for IIT, the lesser ones for the state entrance exams, and become engineers.

The higher ranked ones took Computer Science and Electronics, then Mechanical and Electrical and finally Civil and the other branches. It almost seemed as if the latter branches were "bad" branches, people never thought who would build bridges if not Civil engineers. '

I have never seen an engineering entrance exam topper taking Civil, Mechanical or Architecture out of sheer passion.

Then finally almost all of them end up in software. Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, ceramic, plastic...all engineers write obscure code in multinational software companies.

Everyone keeps slogging like we did for the tenth board percentage, the engineering entrance rank, percentages, jobs without stopping for once to decide as to what was our ambition.

Did we ever had an ambition in the first place?

Even more tricky is 'success'.

Ok now we are into a profession, we get married, have kids, own cars and houses and strive hard to grow in our professions.

However who is a successful person?

A CEO at 35 with a divorced wife because he could not give her time? Someone who is unanimously believed to be a rogue and does not have many friends?

Or a business tycoon worth millions with a son who is heavily into drugs and a daughter who is seeing a psychologist because she feels lonely and left alone?

What is the measure of success? Money alone?

Well one might argue that money and overall wealth is the only tangible measure of success in the real world. But then is everything in the world tangible? Is success tangible? Or is it that the non tangible things are actually the decisive factors for success?

In my opinion there are two kinds of successes.

One is the success in the eyes of the world. The rank in the entrance exam, the percentage in engineering, the pay packet and designation.

The other is the success in the eyes of oneself which may or may not include parts of the first success.

The problem with the first kind of success is that you are governed by the rules of the world to be happy and content. You are successful only if you stand up to the collective definition of success by the inhabitants of the society you live in.

The second kind of success is in the mind. You decide your goals and aspirations and decide for yourself whether you were successful in achieving them.

For me success has to be journey, a well rounded journey, where the various aspects of human life are given due weightage. Aspects like personal, professional, social, spiritual, passions et al.

To be successful for me means to be successful in all these important aspects of life. Otherwise it would be like scoring 90+ in two subjects and less than 10 in three others. That gives one an overall rank of a failure.

For enjoying the second kind of success we need to be able to set our own specific goals and ambitions first with as much detachment as possible from outward pressures.

Sadly many of us are not able to form that in the first place!

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