The other day I was watching a video where a reporter was interviewing Donald Trump voters, and he asked them why they will vote for him. Almost all of them, if not all, said that he was a very successful man with a lot of money and power. Before you keep reading this article, I just want to say that this article is not about Donald Trump. I am tired to say the least of seeing his face in media everywhere. However, the answers of his voters made me think about the definition of success, or what it means to be a successful person. So I looked up the definition of success on Google (of course) and then in the Cambridge dictionary. The definition is; “achieving desired results, or achieving the result of making a lot of money.” I also looked up the definition on Merriam-Webster and this definition came up as “the fact of getting or achieving wealth, respect, or fame.” Finally, I found some synonyms in thesaurus.com and among the synonyms that I found were fruitful, lucrative and wealthy. So this word is really simple to understand right?
SUCCESS=MONEY. That is what the world is yelling at us constantly, aside from impossible beauty standards of course, that money is not only equal to success, but also to happiness.
So there is not a doubt that if you want to be a successful person, go and make a lot of those dollar bills--because if you have money, you also have power. If you have these, do you have the perfect recipe for a joyful and happy life? How did we make the word money have a higher value than it really does?
Why is it that in its definition there is not honesty, love or compassion? Success should not be something tangible; success should be defined as an adjective that has no limit. Do not get me wrong: money is important, there is no doubt about it, but it is not the most important thing or at least it should not be. I do not want to have a preachy tone either; I am nobody to tell you how to live your life and what success means to you, but it saddens me that we are putting the bar of success so low. Anybody can make money, anybody, but not everybody can keep their family together or can open their heart to a stranger.
As a college student, I am afraid of my future. I wake thinking what if I cannot make enough money, but how much is enough? I am obviously not just talking about enough to cover my basic needs, because that is not enough right.
We are afraid of not having enough money and that fear is rational but we are more scared of not having money than not fully living our lives. We are not scared of the lack of compassion that we have, we are not scared of putting all the effort we can muster into something that can disappear so quickly.
I do not want to be one of those people that wake up every day hating what they do. I want to be out of college knowing that I will do something that I love and that takes courage, but of course that word is not in the definition of success. How many friends that have graduated tell me that they hate what they do, that they wake up at 6 a.m. and come back home at 11 p.m. and the next day they will do the same exact thing hating it as much as they did the day before.
And all that sweat, tears and stress for one thing. That green, lightweight god that we have created.
A successful person is made of so many more attributes than just being wealthy; compassion, hard work, generosity and the list could go on and on. While wealth would probably find a spot on the list, it will never be the first on mine.
