With the olympics over, a new set of winners among some previous winners. In India, we are celebrating our girls winning proudly all over on their return. Though there is a gradual uprise in other sports of the audience, soon enough though the focus will shift to Cricket: We have dropped down to No. 2 in test rankings afterall! That too to our arch-rivals! Soon the facebook walls will be flooded with posts about it and so I begin this post with the idea from a cricketing point of view. Was it a failure for Team India that they are now number 2? Was it a success for them that they had beaten WI 2-0 in the series? These questions can be answered in both ways and I am sure the comments will have that sooner or later but those will be what we percieve success as. We tend to believe what success is for us should be same for everyone out there. But it is the view point of the players that actually matters. I am sure they were itching to go out and win specially with no rains after the first day. They cannot think and believe it is a failure. Yet one can say they failed and that is when it gets confusing. That is where the resolve of the team, their support staff and their families comes to fore.
We always face failures ever since we are a child. We don't know how to walk but learn it failing to do so. Same is with cycling or rather learning anything. But what keeps us going even after all these failures? Is it the motivation and the efforts of people around us? The support they put in? Or is it the knowledge that we know failure wont take anything away? But then we should stop after falling once or twice getting bruised up. But we don't. What keeps us going is the desire to relive the happiness that we had while learning. I am sure none of us would remember their time when they learnt to walk. But you sure can recall a moment when you learnt anything. No I donot mean in those classes. I for one learnt riding a bicycle very late. I was somewhere around 10 -12 when I tried doing so and it was the same. Started slowly slowly with the fear and then turned up the speed only to fall at the first corner. But even after the fall and the bruises it was the gleeful feeling I felt when I rode it that I wanted to learn it. With every sport you play, you definitely get bruises but you keep enjoying and playing those. This happiness is what keeps us going.
And this happiness is our success. If you try to be successful in life in anything but don't feel happy learning it, you may keep doing it but you won't feel successful. However, even if you persue any goals but you are happy in pursuit of it, you will feel successful in every moment of life.
Now I don't mean to create a wave of youngsters who say we are happy sleeping and so we will do that. The rapidly increasing engineering colleges provide a very good set of youth who will not be interested in learning any thing about engineering but want to earn money. Most of them don't have a way of interest and thus no happiness. Sometimes you know what will bring you happiness but then there is a path to it. There is NO SHORTCUT to success afterall. If you want to be a Kalpana Chawla then you have to start from learning the basics. No one will directly put you into a space shuttle and launch you.
So in simple, success for me is just finding your happiness and doing it. Achievement may be anything and it may be easy to achieve or difficult. It may be short termed or take a full life. But the path to success can never be boring. If it is, you might be on the wrong path becuase if it ain't bringing you happiness, it won't lead you to the top.
