The Definition of Success (Response to The Art of Failure and How I Hacked My Brain with Adderall)

“Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin.”

“We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles.”

“We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.”

(The Art of Failure)

 “It's kind of like going to the pharmacist, complaining of having Mystery AIDS, the flu, and erectile dysfunction, and getting one single pill to cure them all, but the pill is actually no pills at all.”

“Going a little furthur I’d say it's a duty to think actively about how we can use medicine and technology to expand the limits of our knowledge, to define new paradigms of information that will help everyone deal with an explosion of knowledge that no one in the world knows how to deal with.”

“All of this, of course, is one person's perspective. Your mileage will certainly vary drastically.”

(How I Hacked My Brain with Adderall)

The Definition of Success

                We spin, endlessly, infinitely, and seemingly limitlessly. The world, filled with beings that possess the ability to talk and walk, ought to have some form of clear disambiguation when it comes to the end result of an action. In said action, competition is produced when two people want to judge which action wins out over the other; rivalry is elementary. Pit these people against each other to produce the idea of success, explicit or implied. How do you judge a person for how well they do? The status of a product produced is relative; because it’s not finite, no single person can discern how successful a particular thing or action is.

                I grasp things differently. When I was about eleven years old, I understood what failure was completely. I was taking a vocabulary quiz with other students in my class and I proceeded to cheat off the kid next to me in an effort to avoid getting a failing grade that I’d have to bring home to my father. You don’t just bring back that sort of news; it’s the sort of news best felt, specifically in the rear. I was going to cheat, I did cheat, and I got caught so laughingly easily I can remember the snickering by the other children in the room when I was written up by my teacher.

                There was a particular sting in the air as a felt the note being drafted up. Perhaps, if Malcolm Gladwell’s piece The Art in Failure holds truth to the perception in success and failure in the world today, then, yes, “human beings sometimes falter under pressure” so much to the point we don’t just stumble. We fall. A lot. This is because of what drives us. Instead of wanting to merely complete a task, we seek out to do the 110% to feel a form of validation that’s practically alien to explain. But, by Trent Wolbe’s How I Hacked My Brain with Adderall a laughable tale about drug use to awaken the brain to new possibilities, this desire to succeed, and do all we can to succeed, is subjective, it’s all “one’s perspective” and that perspective varies greatly from person to person. Holding a person accountable to the idea of a form of success set in place by another is trying to copycat perfection, which isn’t possible by any means.

                Many turn to the use of other things to achieve their success and while “medicine and technology [can] expand the limits of our knowledge” this limit should be broken through the self, rather than through alternative means; success comes in many shapes and sizes, in different colours and forms, but a “poor performance. . . reflects the complexion of the audience” meaning that before we go about judging others on what they do we must first ask ourselves what we’re capable of individually; we cannot go about asking for what we can’t do.