How to Develop your Best Definition of Success

Aashna Nilawar - Board Member

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Success is a state of mind, an attitude that charges every choice and every outcome in our lives. Having a positive attitude helps us overcome obstacles and discouragement. Our self desire for success equates to a self responsibility to discipline the mind to be positive and this discipline denotes the difference between reaching the threshold and crossing it.

For the past 3 years, I have endlessly heard a stream of questions with no other purpose than to obtain from me my choice of college, career, so on as a measure of potential success. So although I live in Silicon Valley which is more heavily concentrated with careers in technology and computer science, I explain my contrasting interests in public policy, in government and society dynamics, and the effort that activists everywhere take to better conditions for everyone. I am exhausted of surprised faces and nervous laughs and the reflection these gestures emit of the very restrained manner in which so many define success.

As a first generation South Asian child, success, as we are often taught, is usually linked to a college, job, and family. As a Bay Area resident, success is also very easily linked to a stable job in the tech industries.

Before I go on to explain the inconsistencies between these definitions of success and the ones we should aspire to have, let me offer my version: financially independent, have my own home, have my own car, socially secure, and self aware. This interpretation means that my future career and the effort I take to secure it now takes precedence over most things. It’s also why I’m recognized as a workaholic at 17 years old. The version of success that I and so many like me face as part of societal expectations makes immense efforts to drown out personal meanings of success. It works to transform the smaller gradual successes of individuals into larger failures when compared to this uninspired picture of what achievement looks like.

This is not to say that I am completely apart from what my family expects of me; I still aspire to make my parents proud but in a broader sense that also forces them to see how my definition of success fits in with theirs. Both of my parents have given a lot to reach where they are now so it’s no secret that their hardships have heavily influenced what we see for my future. My choice to define achieving success the way I do cultivates similarly; I have only shifted the specifics of what really marks my current or potential success. Rather than a pressure to take all honors or AP classes, it’s focusing on my ability to maintain my GPA. Rather than attending just the best college in the nation, it’s focusing on my ability to do well in the classes I take no matter where I go. Rather than having the highest paying job, it’s focusing on being the best at what I do. And the “rather” could have been, can be, and might actually be a part of the process during which I achieve the latter part of the statements I just made. This may be so, but I know that the medium through which I gauge my success must be altered in order to remove the trapped sensation that is almost inevitable with limited and high expectations.

In the end, success should be defined by your circumstances, your abilities, and your goals. The outside community will always offer its opinion but the understanding we must maintain of what a true personally appropriate definition of success is must be larger, more defined, and more powerful than any expectation limit placed upon us.

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What does success mean to you? Share your ideas below!