November 11 2012 Is success earned or do people succeed because they are lucky?

Everyone has a different point of view of “success.” For example, entering a good college would be considered success” for high school students and getting the exact present you wanted from Santa Claus would be a huge success for young kids. However, in order for the college to accept you, you would have to study hard and have to scores for your exams. Santa would only give you presents if we're nice to your friends and respected your parents. I believe that success in life is earned rather because if you were lucky, it wouldn’t be success – you would have just been fortunate.

The majority of people in Korea enjoy participating in the Lottery. They hope to earn a huge amount of money with luck. However, there is only one winner out of thousands of people. I’ve read a newspaper saying that out of ten people who have won the lottery, eight of them are either divorced or unhappy. This is because the winners don’t know how they are going to divide the money. It was actually proven that people who live in small towns with less money are actually happier than those who live in huge houses with a lot of money. Winning the lottery could be a success for some people, but there is a high possible of long-term consequences that they didn’t expect.

Every single chief executive officer in companies, have spent more than decades of studying and thinking of new ideas no one has ever thought of. When they made their own company, some have been successful and some have not. I believe that this success has more benefit than winning the lottery because it has more meaning to that person. Success can mean having a high position in your career or reaching the amount of money you have aimed for, but it can also mean something you have earned by hard work. This can be either riding your own bicycle, having a good score in a test or project, or even getting a toy you’ve always wanted.

All in all success isn’t earned because of your hard work and ambitions, not because you were lucky.  If I think about the ties I had success, most of them include years of hard or hard decisions. My definition of success is aiming for something with passion and achieving more than what you have expected.