Fun Sunday: What does “Success” mean to you?
In this fascinating and full of humor Ted Talk, Alan de Botton talks about the ideas of failure and success in the 21st century.
Please see our favorite quotes below:
1) “We live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew – about our lives, about our careers -comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality… It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.”
2) “The problem of modern society is it turns the whole world into a school. Everybody’s wearing jeans, everybody’s the same. And yet, they’re not. So there’s a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation.”
3) “What is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which, if you’ve got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back. It’s a beautiful idea. The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.”
4) “We should NOT give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”
