Do you have what it takes to build up yourself to become successful? First, you have to understand what success is because although it seems to be objectively defined based on the successor, it is a map to success. Have you ever thought about a road map to success? Think about it. Many say that success is the accomplishment of a goal or a sculpted purpose, so why do we generally define success with popularity or profit. Success is theorized to be importantly connected between belief and actions, so it embodies the natural and mental willingness to pursue something which can lead to a fruitful overflow of materialistic goods. When committing to success there also has to be underlining of growing health, and this comes from your overall well being in physical and your mental stability, which is scientifically proven by Professors De Prado Sales and Javier Gonzalez, that healthy family relations are the start to a promising successful lifestyle because it brings support. As you can see success does not come from solely your social placement and financial success, but it also comes from your physical and mental health as well as a positive family orientation.
Why would someone frame the necessities of success with limitations? Richard H.P. Mendes, an American Sociologist, states that it’s easier to be able to reach success when there are specific limits on the type of goals you can control and be realistic about. This is why mental and physical health, financial success, and a healthy orientation are a part of the definition of success. The necessity for setting realistic goals for your success is a part of how your goals are able to become a true investment. The limitations were mentioned and set by Mendes because it is meant to become attainable by all economic groups because some are born with resources that some aren’t fortunate to have but these limitations can be built through discipline to become rounded of success. When people attain their path to success they have to have the vulnerability to be open about their journey for the social pathologies of others to help them bode along and progress in their goals. This may be harder for some because some success stories contain a background that contains trials that helped them earn their success mentally and financially, while some success stories had already attainable networking that helped them reach their success financially and socially. People go through different journeys that will help build them into a person ready to obtain success.
On our journey to understand if success is always earned, we will start our venture on understanding the importance of family from two successor’s stories. One that had their family’s support along the way and another that did not have the most positive family interaction in their lives. William(Bill) Henry Gates III was continuously intelligent throughout his childhood and he was allowed by his warm and wealthy family at a young age to pursue his passion: computers. He went to Lakeside high school which was a private school that gave him the resources for a profound education for computers which instilled him to increase his human capacity from intelligence. He continued building his passion through his junior years to college at Harvard, then he decided to drop out and go home to experiment at his parents’ home. His parents instilled the human capacity of dedication and drive since they were alive during the Great Depression. Bill Gates was given the resources at a young age to build his human capital in his passion, but some weren’t able to achieve this at such a young age. Oprah Winfrey was born into a household of a single mother and did not have the funds nor support to pursue her dreams at such a young age. She was sexually assaulted at the age of 9 and became pregnant at 14 and then had a miscarriage. After these traumatic times, Oprah started to live with the neighborhood barber who soon became her father and she started to become encouraged and grew out of her discouragement. While in high school, Oprah eventually was able to pursue her love as being a radio host and then went to Tennessee State to grow knowledge in her craft as an entertainer. While Oprah and Gates both are well known as modern-day successors they received different support systems from their families. They both were able to overcome different challenges and work towards their success and gain their needed human capital to dominate. How did these two different lifestyles reach success with a vastly different parent environment? Was it luck?
Researchers of social connections Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris agreed that family engagement from a young age can enable individuals to advocate and improve themselves. This makes sense for Bill Gates but how did Opera have such a good outcome? Robinson and Harris noticed if someone has family support in the earlier years of life, being birth to high-school, then they are known to thrive intelligently, have better communication skills, and more active in their community whether it’s a low-income or fairly wealthy environment. This study also showed if you have an unsupportive family and they are only able to mentally torment you at home then you are 70% more likely to pursue your time elsewhere. Oprah was able to put all her effort into her school work which had her build her strong mentality of never giving up. Whether you want to admit it or not, your family is more important to being a part of your success whether it’s your single mother, your stepbrother, the barber that stood up to the challenge of raising you: family is family. The lessons they teach whether good or bad create every success story, but you choose what you take away from it.
While family is a massive part of how you grow your mentality of being a successful person, there is another aspect that you hear every musician to self-made billionaire say is important: health. When people think of health they usually sway to solely physical health but to be successful you need to maintain your physical and mental well-being. Imagine trying to be successful but never believing in yourself and having a negative mindset 24/7. Will that lead you anywhere? Never. As the queen of the runway, Tyra Banks, once said, “take responsibility for yourself because no one’s going to take responsibility for you” in her novel Modelland. Malachi Thomson who is a leadership and performance consultant for the Entrepreneur explains to be ready for greatness you have to have then mindset to perform at your greatest potential. Thompson gives us 3 laws of health to build people up for success as well as keep them at the mindset of a successor. First, you need to seek someone to confide in to continue a natural flow of a positive release of emotions, because it is not healthy to keep your emotions kept in. Secondly, you should exercise alone not only improve your mental fitness but also so you can set your body up for efficient rest. Lastly, find someone you can support, because when you support another person then you find benefit of becoming successful. This also ties back into someone supporting you mentally in the end. To be successful you need to be able to maintain your health and look towards bettering your life so you can take on the challenges of being successful and maintain your stability. As Snoop Dogg once said, “That’s why I’m so successful because peace is my main thing. It’s not about money it’s about making sure everybody is having a good time and loving, living and enjoying life”. To be successful you need to build yourself up mentally as you do physically to be successful, just look at any successful person and you can tell their niech is fierce. Now, the third necessity of how to craft a fully successful person besides your wellbeing and family: wealth. When trying to understand the laws of wealth that lead to success you have to ask yourself “what is the more vs. less?”. Micheal F. Kay, a personal finance journalist of Forbes, says to be successful you have understand who you as a person. Do you want to be a person who has more but buy less, or has more and learn how to budget more? You have to know yourself and your limits to control your temptation and desires so you can overcome them. To be able to reach your financial goal you have to primarily create a goal that can be realistically achieved. These goals can change over time based on how you excel but you have to start somewhere. Start by making small habits of saving to pay off any debt and commit to it. With saving comes sacrifice, so continue to be realistic of your limitations. Then find a hobby that keeps your interest and create an idea of how to flourish that into a profession. This might sound risky to some, but being able to juggle your current profession and your dream is another sacrifice that you have to make. Then once you grow in your passion start to make a brand off of your new found hobby and see how it can interact with consumers to make profit whether it’s a good or service. During this experience you have to monitor your progress, and expect and look for possible problems you’ll run into. To become financially successful you have to have a passion and a willingness to be motivated as well as sacrificial to horrible habits in your life. Financial success will not come easily but if you stay persistent towards your goals and dreams.
Overall, here’s what I’ve learned that you should take on your journey to finding success. It won’t come easy, because although some are more fortunate than others with the resources they receive from birth, we all have to work hard towards our dream of a happy ending. Start with your support system, which is your family that should be the positive people along the way. I know some people don’t have a biological family, so you can choose the people the people that have been a positive light in your life. Next, you have to mentally be able to take on the challenge of having to fail and persevere as well as build the courage to always believe in yourself. While being mentally fit will guide you to stating physically fit, you do need to put in an effort of taking care of yourself physically towards the point of happiness. Finally, you have to guide yourself through your passions to build yourself up financially with motivation, sacrificial actions, and a plan to achieve your goals. From looking into the mindsets of financial advisors and philosophical thinkers around the goal, I’ve realized that you always have the ability to build yourself up to become successful. All you have to do is be willing to put yourself up to the challenge.
Process Reflection 2
I have recently realized how I want to take on such a broad topic: success. With research from multiple cites, with the help of JSTOR, I have found that we usually define success solely on wealth. While this is true, people of success mainly base their success on three categories: wealth, physical health, and family. I have been currently trying to create an in-depth outline for my first draft. I have currently made my intro for the paper as well as rearranged the communication details of my external and internal sources. I have discovered to become someone of wealth your goal should never be money, it should be to prosper in your game plan of the reality of what to achieve. The money will eventually come once you continue towards your goal, but you have to sacrifice by trying to prosper on your passions. Many people grind for wealth by a profession that they think will be able to gain money and not a profession they’re passionate about. I came to this conclusion from reading “Still Unsuccessful: The Unsolved Problems of Success Semantics.” by Javier González De Prado Salas. This seems like a fairly understandable concept but in order to understand my thesis. To understand my concept to build success, you have to understand the process of probability, and the effect that sacrifice has on your probability of becoming successful. I believe that others would most likely understand this process from creating a probability map of success or a card game to explain the changes based on the research of literary scholars, the lives of everyday people, and the successors that we see as our idols today. My artifacts could be collectibles that we hold to show our success but in reality, it holds 0% of importance usually. I would need to consult with my internal and external contacts to create facts for my artifacts. In order for these artifacts to happen, I need to talk to my contacts as well as further my research. I am now curious about what makes the success factors of successors overlap a trend. This process is still in process but it is slowly but surely coming along.
Process Reflection 1
Success is the accomplishment of personal achievement, but society’s definition is the balanced achievement of wealth. When we were younger we had the unknowing intention to better ourselves in everything we do, but how do we know when our betterment is enough?
As I sit in Starbucks with people that seem to have the visual representation of success and some that seem to be reaching for the mere breach to have their success, they have one thing in common with each other: a consciously created dream or life purpose. I want to discover how our individual success can be defined and put into a simplified equation for someone to become successful. As I read an article on the success from the view of sociologist of National Academy of Science of the United States of America, I realized that the initial build for someone that will gain success is simply from the charts of seeing success. The real question is how did the person who started the domino effect of success in their family occurs? Was it luck, or passion, or the build-up from unfortunate events that shaped their personality?
The American Sociologist stated, “ to acknowledge the limits of success can only encourage a more rational pursuit of our humanistic goals through the development of different approaches and strategies and, not incidentally, contribute to the credibility of our profession.” This means that we would have to detract the possible years at Harvard or the experience, the build-up to be success is solely detracted away from that. Why? There are top tier fashion designers who are self-taught and some who have gone to a-lister schools for fashion, so there isn’t a barrier to how you got your skill. Success is built off of how you express your skill. This is not the only attribute that relinquishes your success.
I need to research the differences in people’s success to understand to create a success that is broad and limits the goal of success. This tells the path of finding the mindset to ones that are formal or usual with great success such as Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerburg, and Mike Kreiger. This information will be found from researching information under the American Sociologist and National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
People who are an education in the field of finance, business, and history have different perspectives of what success is and I want to find the overlapping similarities. I plan to talk to Mr. Curtis about the financial necessities for success. Then I would talk to Mr. Foreman for the business necessities for success since he’s been through multiple years of being a part of the administration. Finally, I will talk to Mr. Diaz-Williamson about the spiritual mindset you would need to be prompted to succeed.
I want to start with Mr. Diaz-Williamson because he seems to have an outlook on the philosophical view of things. I want to get his opinion on how he thinks success is defined because he has a background of religion, politics, and philosophy. My goal is to ask some business owners and CEOs about their definition of success and if it’s forever changing due to its direct relation to their changing goals. Now that I have planned my next few steps for my capstone, I think that I will continue if not further my research of how people differentiate their success whether if it’s how they got there or the occupation of their success. Now, I will continue this process by setting up my internal interview and researching using the American Sociologist and National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Draft Questions
As a person of business what would you say are the base categories of success?
Do you believe that success can be breeded generationaly? Would it be unconventional from someone of a lower class to try to go on a popular path of success? In current day of America starting to suffer economically do you think that the broad topic of success generically being known as wealth be changed in definition?
Do you believe that not excepting the possibility is the right mindset when going on your journey for success?
Annotated Bibliography
Damnjanovic, Nic. “Deflationism and the Success Argument.” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), vol. 55, no. 218, 2005, pp. 53–67. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3542768. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.
While it may seem reasonable or easily understood why some want success, we never really understand the reason we define certain things as our goals to achieve success. Nic Damnjanovic explains that there are attainable goals you have to set in order to gain success. He gives the factor of being able to have success, you would have to keep true to your argument and purpose of life. Damnjanovic also talk about the idea of deflationist which is the theory of predicating the truth of success. This will be helpful because it will honestly state the truthful steps of setting your goals up for success, and in order to understand the limits of success, I have to realize the steps it takes to become successful.
De Prado Salas, Javier González. “Still Unsuccessful: The Unsolved Problems of Success Semantics.” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, vol. 33, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26355566. Accessed 13 Feb. 2020.
Can success be limited to a simple push from how much of your life you put towards that accomplishment? Prado Salas, an international journalist who studies the history and foundation of science, who explains the theories of success sematics that highlight the mental preparation and success conditions to build a habit of actions. He also clarifies that a person of success should be willing to have times of failure, due to failure building growth and character. I think this is a method I need to understand in order to create a list of a successful mindset.
Mendes, Richard H. P. “Sociologists, Social Policy and the Estranged Poor: The Selective Inattention to the Limits of Success.” The American Sociologist, vol. 24, no. 2, 1993, pp. 16–36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27698645. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.
There is a known limitation of success that is called poverty. In order to build a correct algorithm of how to become successful I need to understand the barrier for all economic classes. What are social interventions for people who are less fortunate? Mendes states that if we were just create a social intervention this would not be beneficial because it would not change the actions of the public. When acknowledging the limits of success you have to state humanistic goals that set a clear standard of possibilities.
Van de Rijt, Arnout, et al. “Field Experiments of Success-Breeds-Success Dynamics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 111, no. 19, 2014, pp. 6934–6939. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23772701. Accessed 11 Feb. 2020.
In my research the most essential question that I ask is why there isn’t an ability to put limitation on succes, as well as why there’s a constant inequality of the amount of success people can maintain in one time period. This journal will explain the reasoning of people who eventually become successful breed more successors, like when they say olympians can breed more olympians and NBA stars will automatically have talented basketball players as children. The question us why is this true? Does your success count on your lineage or can you be the first person to start the breeding of success? This article expresses and explains a study of if successful people can continue to create a successful lineage or if they put too much pressure on each other to make their empire crumble?
Wray, K. Brad. “Selection and Predictive Success.” Erkenntnis (1975-), vol. 72, no. 3, 2010, pp. 365–377. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40784321. Accessed 13 Feb. 2020.
In theory I currently believe that success can be influenced on someone by the past paths that have been created to achieve success, but Wray believes a contrasting theory. This is necessary because he will help me justify the necessity to follow the pre-created reality of possible success. How would we know if this that we’ve created for ourselves can be sculpted into a goal driven path to accomplishment? Wray bring Frassen into his argument to help explain the selection and prediction of who can can not gain success based on realism. Wary believes that if we set our minds to the current ways to become successful then we may lack the ability to become accomplished since predictive success is not always relative success.