Diluted achievement, no thanks

Everybody wants to succeed. That’s almost needless to be said. We all have an instinct to seek new challenges and outperform either ourselves or other people. We all have a craving for accomplishment.

And here I am, a deviant. I’m not saying I don’t want to succeed. Rather, success is not something I prioritize and chase anymore. It dawned on me that success is something abstract—with no standard definition, cannot be contained in a checklist, subject to interpretation. People interpret things towards what is convenient for them.

I have seen a lot of situations where people define best practices and the strict closed rules and procedures to reach them. But then, due to a lot of constraints, those things were not achieved. So, they reassess their standards, and significantly lower them, and settle for whatever was achieved. Well actually, as long as the output is achieved, that’s totally fine. But, it bugs me that those are bare minimum—that, I cannot speak loudly because everyone else will think I’m a jerk. But seriously, if the standards are going to be decreased so significantly, what was the initial pressure even for? It honestly damages everyone’s morale. Well, I can’t really speak for everyone. But at least for me, lowering the bar and calling that a win does not repair my world view anymore.

And in those (repeated) situations, I realized something important about myself. I was not striving hard to chase the standards. Rather, I was striving hard not to fall below the standards. As an intuitive, I have a natural inclination to planning and simulation of possibilities to get what I want. So, when I want something, I will plot the whole network of ideas, cast away unnecessary information, prevent the chances I don’t prefer, and orchestrate the best possible route for what I want. When I start that orchestration, there is no turning back. I have to get what I want.

So, it is such a bummer when the standards get adjusted. Admittedly, there are many times that I did not meet the standards initially set, whether they are someone else’s standards or self-inflicted. It does not matter.* If I do not reach it, it’s a failure. Typically, when standards get decreased and my score leaps in to the passing mark, I should be happy, right?

No, I will not be happy at all. Technically, my marks would be “PASSED”. But, I will forever believe that I do not deserve that “achievement”. This is not me being a killjoy. This is me mourning over the broken bar. When the teacher curves the class grades, or when the professor cancels the exams, after pushing the whole class to study like it’s the end of the world tomorrow, I would be the only one sulking in the room.

If the standards initially set were attainable, best-practice, and would make me a better person, why… just why… I want to achieve that bar because no matter who set it first, I make it my own. This false sense of achievement does not make me happy at all. I will still count it as failure.

Anyway, who am I kidding with interpreting this adjustment as a win? If success is easily manipulated to someone’s convenience, then I don’t want to chase success anymore. I will just develop the things that excite me, that make me happy, that pushes me to become a better person without looking at the others in the same racefield.

So, I made it a point that, even if everyone else’s definitions get adjusted, my definition of success and failure for myself is not going to be moved. I will strive to attain my own standards, to do what’s best for myself. I might fail at my own standards. I might get hurt and cry. But, I will uphold my virtues and beliefs. I will not digress just for the sake of giving my self a false sense of achievement.

Yep, I am such a sad and pitiful human.