Success: Revisited, Revised, Reevaluated

I want to be successful. I've wanted to be successful ever since I knew that there was a possibility that I won't be. I think we all want to be successful, yes? But at what cost? I've never seen "success" as a negative thing, and I probably shouldn't; to me achieving success is reaching a point where you've accomplished something that you want to do and are happy with the outcome. Lately though, I've thought about success in a different way, what I refer to as "popular success", where you've achieved something that not only you want, but that 'benefits society', or some cliché like that. And when I think about success this way, I think about it in a much more negative way, like, "what will I have to sacrifice to achieve success?"

A lot of this thought has been prompted by looking into the future, and thinking about stuff like "where do I see myself in 20 years?" Frankly, I don't know. I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, or even 5 days. I don't know what I want to do with my life, how I want to spend my time, reach my goals, or even what goals I want to set. I have a (rather short) list of criteria for my life no matter how I choose to spend it: 1. Enjoy my life and truly like how I live each day 2. Be an all around 'good person' to people around me. That's it. I just want to be good to myself and the people around me. Based off of this it seems like I have an infinite amount of ways to achieve "success", but if I don't truly enjoy what I'm doing then it's not really being successful.

The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be  filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.

I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 17 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all

1st Semester Blogging Reflection

I’m not trying to be cynical or overly critical, as my blog lens may suggest, but being brutally honest I can’t say I’ve learned much from blogging. I suppose that doesn’t really accurately address the prompt though, since I’m not supposed to be reflecting on what I’ve learned from blogging, but what I’ve learned about blogging. In this case, the simplest and most universally true answer I can give is that blogging is very much an investment. An investment of time, effort, personality, and priority where what you receive as enriching and stimulating takeaways is directly proportional to the work and care you put in to the blogging process.

It is probably for this reason that I’m still skeptical of blogs. Before engaging in the process myself, I didn’t have the most positive perception of the productivity and usefulness of blogs. I pretty much assumed that they existed in their own little microcosm of the internet, and more often than not the only people who cared about the content and quality of a particular blog is the author themselves. Obviously this sentiment isn’t true, but it is definitely problematic; as a form of media, part of the purpose of blogs should be to engage people in thought and conversation about some important topic. The open-endedness seems to disadvantage blogs though, where they tend to drown each other out in the chatter, purely as a product of their existence. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to give a dissertation on why blogs, are counter productive, I’m just trying to convey the point that I didn’t have the healthiest view of how blogs could be advantageous prior to having to write one myself. Parts of this hyper-negative point of view has definitely subsided over the course of maintaining my own blog, but unfortunately it some of it remains.  

I haven’t been able to bust my preconceived notion that blogs exist predominantly in their own respective microcosms of the outrageously vast internet. What I have found is that this isn’t entirely a bad thing. If the target audience for a blog happens to be pretty limited, like that of our Academy class, then blogging can actually be an appropriately sized forum for us to communicate ideas. We’ve effectively carved out a little section of the internet to collaborate and communicate amongst ourselves, something I value as one of the most important aspects of the Academy program. The most constructive and useful blog posts are those like Matthew’s on Wal-Mart, and Ross’s on the ICC, because they’re cogent, original posts, followed by a bevvy of equally interesting and stimulating comments from others. I know my own thoughts and opinions thrive off of other people’s, which I consider to be a healthy sign of openness and sympathy. As old fashioned as it may sound, I’m a firm believer that the best, most effective form of communication is face to face conversation, but blogging has been interesting in the sense that it’s extended ideas from our class and conversations to places where we can let ideas sit and ruminate, later reconvening online to further discuss them. This is probably the ideal use of blogs, to serve as a supplement to continue dialogue that already exists amongst a group of people, and a platform to revisit ideas deserving more attention.

It would make sense that the ideal usage of blogs emphasizes what I consider to be the single statement I’ve learned to be absolutely true of blogs, that they’re an investment. I’ve found my own blog to be most significant and interesting when I write posts that other people comment on and use for discussion. Whether people agree with me or not, their interest alone validates what I’ve written about as important and worth sharing. This is part of the reason I picked a blog lens that could potentially be pretty inflammatory, and Jacob’s comment on my first real post saying, “I love the fact that you raised this issue,” was comforting in a vindicating sort of way.

As we continue with these blogs, I think the healthiest thing for our blogging community would be more investment. This definitely entails an element of group effort, but for myself I’d like to continue to write posts that stir conversation and inquiry amongst readers. Through increased comments and continuing to incorporate what might be becoming my blog’s trademark phrase, “is this such a bad thing?,” I just want to keep things interesting and entertaining.

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