What does success mean to you? A dictionary defines success as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose, but is this accurate for everyone? Most people would tell you that being successful is being looked up to or by doing better than others. At what point do you consider yourself to be successful or not? Personally I believe that being successful is doing what you want with your life and should only be defined by yourself, not others. For example the only person that I think should consider my life successful or not is me. Margaret Mead defined success as a, “…a source of confusion. …We are taught to celebrate and admire the one who gets the highest grades, the one voted most attractive, or most likely to succeed.” (Mead The Egalitarian Error) …show more content…
Her exact wording is; “But while we often rejoice in the success of people far removed from ourselves-people who work in another profession, live in another community, or are endowed with a talent we do not especially want for ourselves….” It’s not hard to think about someone who is considered famous or in a high social class. It’s also not hard to think about those peoples personal success, mainly due to the excessive amount of news tabloids that make a living on other people’s lives. For example, more people know the newest gossip about Brad Pitt and his success, but could honestly care less about the success of their neighbors. Why is this? Why do we care more about people who we don’t know and less about those who are right next door? I agree with Mead that we are all guilty of giving strangers recognition for their success, I am guilty of doing so myself. I also agree with Mead that we should work toward fixing this problem. America was founded by people who were tired of being told they could not do what they wanted, striving for freedom. Why are we still allowing some to feel better than the rest? The true American thing to do is to put people in their place, they might have nicer things and more money, but that does not make them physically better than the rest of us. No Forefather would have accepted the fact that …show more content…
It is not hard for best friends admit their jealousy when their friends do better than they do. Personally, when my best friend Burk succeeds, I feel a little jealous and wish I was better, knowing the feeling is mutual. Americans are born and bred to believe we are the best people on Earth and that there is nothing we cannot accomplish. When someone else proves us to be inferior we do not take it lightly, instead we start to think of any and all ways to better them. Mead says we feel literally threatened by the success of those who are; “close at hand, within our small group….” Why is it that we feel this way? I personally believe that when people we see as equals to ourselves do great things we feel that we should have been able to do the same. Personally I feel like it’s a personal stab to my heart when someone close to me does better than I do, even if it’s something as simple as getting a better score on an exam. Americans have always desired to do great things, because of this we are always working long and hard, causing us to become as successful as physically possible. The threat we feel at the success of those close to us is because of a jealous fire that ignites deep inside our soul. It is human nature to want to be the biggest, best around, adding the American Dream to this makes for a very jealous prone person. We feel threatened by the success of