What is Success?

Life when you’re growing up has volatile aspirations. Meaning that if people love one thing growing up it can completely change as they grow. It may even change multiple times in a year, which explains the volatility of it. Growing up is a weird time and people aren’t always sure what their path is going to look like. I have always grown up with some sort of large-scale goal in mind. When I was in primary school I wanted to be a scientist who built a time machine and brought dinosaurs back. As I grew older my ideas changed for me. Life became real before I even knew it. Growing older and more mature my values are changing which often happens to people when they grow up and it is just a natural part of life development.

Mr. Anderson, a teacher at Oak Hill High School had many aspirations growing up “When you were in high school what career did you want to pursue?” I asked.

“Finance, working on Wall St, getting rich” Mr. Anderson replied. He grew up in not the greatest financial spot. He had his richer side of the family but he had his side of the family which was not in the best financial position. This made growing up in Cumberland, Maine harder because everyone he went to school with had rich parents. “I really didn’t like the culture of the school that was dominated by people who had all this inherited wealth that wasn’t earned… Kids who took credit for their parents’ accomplishments” Mr. Anderson said. So being around this culture he never felt like he fit in and it made him feel more alone when he was growing up.

Life changes in ways that are not always expected. Mr. Anderson went to high school expecting to study finance and economics and eventually working on Wall St. But when he got enrolled into Colgate University and was majoring in economics and finance he didn’t want to be like the people who were rich and snarky, so he majored in history. “Some of it was sort of growing up and getting different values. Being a teenager I thought that having money would make me old somehow… Once I grew out of that a little bit in my early twenties I realized that I wanted to do something that had an impact on someone. I had friends in San Francisco and one of them asked me to come help him tutor at his school and I had never thought I’d wanna work with kids, but I helped out and I liked it” he said. When he was about to start college his dream job was to be an investment banker but when he graduated college he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do and his friend helped him find his passion for teaching

“Would you say it was a morality thing for you of being an investment banker and realizing that they aren’t always good people?” I asked.

“Yeah and having money and things to show off didn’t appeal to me as much as it used to, it seemed really important to me when I was like seventeen not so much when I was twenty-three,” he said. Growing up throughout life people look to be successful but how can success be defined? It’s a personal topic, everyone has their own success and it can change throughout the natural passageway of life

“What is success to you?” I asked.

“I think success is contentment day to day, knowing you’re not always gonna be cognisant or realize the impact you have but feeling like you have an impact on other people, whether it’s your family or your coworkers and in my case students and then being able to have a balance between work and life along with having enough money to support that” Mr. Anderson says. Success can come to people in many different ways, for some it’s much larger than others and for others it’s smaller and personal. Mr. Anderson wanted to have an impact on people and change their lives even if it’s small. Now obviously his idea of success changed as he grew up “How has this idea of success changed when you were a high school student, when you were a college student obviously now?” I questioned.

“I think high school was definitely a way of keeping score, you know I had this idea of I was really smart so I am gonna be really rich but there’s a lot more that goes into it than that there’s people skills and ideas and work ethic…In college that started to change I saw people who were interested and making changes…I had friends who wanted to do projects that were helping out the natural world somehow. Now it’s what is the stability of my relationships with my kids and my friends and my family. You know, now I have been a teacher. I’ve worked at schools for a long time and I hear from kids years later… Who are lawyers and in business like, to me that shows that there is at least some impact” he said. 

In conclusion, success is an indefinable phenomenon that is different for every single person. It is everyone’s desire even if they don’t see it yet. It can change throughout life. It will change as people grow older and grow different values. Some people’s success changes small and some people completely change but overall we all have the common factor of looking for our own unique success. This outlook can apply to not only me but everyone. Everyone has their own ideas of success and it changes for everyone.

“‘Wall Street Bull’” by thenails is licensed under CC BY 2.0.