Defining SUCCESS

Today was my first working day at National Insurance Academy, Pune. So we had an inaugural session this morning with the CEO of AON Global Insurance Services Pvt Ltd as the Chief Guest. The proceedings started with a very interesting presentation by our director, Dr. K.C. Mishra. He spoke and presented a video of top CEO speaking on success.
Well I remember discussing the topic quite a number of times with my friends and we found it tough to coin a definition for the word “success”.
So, this video was courtesy Wharton, where the same question was toasted in front of few CEO for their views.
Many CEO came in with their definitions and each tried to justify their point.
Most of them tried to relate it to the economic status and monetary gains that one makes in his lifetime. Some called it achieving something desired, planned, or attempted. Some said it is meeting all the goals that you set for yourself or fulfilment of all your dreams and desires. But all had one thing in common to say, success is a relative quality.
But then the best definition among all the 10 corporates who answered was from the youngest one. He said success is directly comparable to happiness in life, if a person is happy it implies he is successful. Now it upto the person; what sort of happiness he looks forward to! For example if he is able to satisfy his wife and children at home, it implies he is a successful family man.
Isn’t it well said?? It is for a person to realise whether he is happy with what he has done, no matter how much effort he has put in to achieve it compared to others, he is successful.
While I was about to conclude it as the definition of the day, our director put forward his! He simply said, Success is not a goal, it’s a journey.
It just sums it all.. All other definitions were case sensitive (so, they even contradict the word definition) but the one liner from our director tends to be the complete definition.
If you are happy or achieved success, it just pushes you to crave for more success. The journey is just endless. People need to realise this and climb the ladder of their life. For a 3 year old though learning all the alphabets will be a tough ask, but then he learns things and greater things, so he just keeps raising the bar for himself(though more often by force) and progresses on the path of academic success. And then so in all other fields.. till the end of his life.
This definition is so universal that it can even be used in the case of companies and organisations. Many companies are called (and more often call themselves) successful, but there again it’s a dynamic process. If you are the current leader in a particular industry, you have to ensure that you continue to remain to same. There is always has a potential threat from of other players in the same industry or the new payers coming in. The growth of the company should always be going up, adding on more products and more consumers.
And even the term relativity is explained better here. There isn’t anything like absolute successful with which one has to compare himself. It’s just relative to your past successes, the circumstances and some other factors. Now, it is for a person to make the best out of a situation; his decision makes him the man he would be in future. So, once he is successful in achieving it, he looks for greater task and pushes for more success.
So, people every one on this planet is successful and should be happy for it, and keep looking for opportunities for taking up bigger tasks and doing them successfully.