Chasing Success, Losing Life

How do you define your life? Or to put it more distinctively, what distinguishes your life from others?
When asked this, a lot of you might respond with “success” as the obvious answer. After all, it’s general
human tendency to judge and classify people on the basis of what they have achieved in their life,
especially their status. While I am no erudite or sage to tell you if this perception of life is right or not, I
believe I can help you see things, especially the relationship between life and success, through a
different lens.

Let’s begin by first decoding success. What marks your success? Is it money, or a big bungalow, or a high
managerial position in an MNC, or a luxury vacation abroad? Well, all these might be an identification of
success but are no standards for the same. I believe ‘Success doesn’t define you, you define success in
your own terms’. So, it is bound to mean different things for different people and no one is incorrect.
The relationship between life and success is that of a means and an end. We use our life to strive for and
achieve the end result of success. However, there is a difference of day and night in striving for success
and being lunatic for success. The philosopher Alan Watts always said that life is like a song, and the sole
purpose of the song is to dance. He said that when we listen to a song, we don’t dance with the goal of
getting to the end of the music. We dance to enjoy it. This isn’t always how we live our lives. Instead, we
rush through our moments, thinking there’s always something better, there’s always some goal we need
to achieve. And this where we tend to lose our own lives.

Returning to the question I asked in the beginning, it is not success but experiences that defines or
distinguishes your life from others. Experiences are the ones that shape our whole life and by
experiences I don’t just mean the jolly moments but even the gloomy and despairing ones because all of
them tend to add some value or meaning to our life. You live life by analogy, a journey with a pilgrimage
to get to the end success, heaven, whatever you may call it. You missed the point, a song isn’t just the
ending. It’s not just the goal of finishing the song, the song is an experience. Don’t become blind in the
pursuit of success, become conscious in the song of life.

- Prashant Kumar Tiwari, XII B