SUCCESS IS NOT HAVING EVERYTHING

Sir,

Many critics may arise against people like me, who are yearning for an end. But, I live in a land with unsuccessful people and a lot of people suffer more than succeeding in life. Isn’t it amazing that even the minority who feel and think they are successful, actually don’t know what success is?
Do you see how greedy and egocentric they are? Their jealousy incubates everything

for themselves and turns them against their children, communities and the country. In a country of 1.3 million people, allow me to ask, what is success?
John Milton, an English writer and poet, in 1644, said; “Some have doubts of what will be their success, others with fear of what will be the approval, some with hope, others with confidence of what they have to prompt.”

Success

If he had said success in the old days was dubious, then I think success is invisible. If he had said success was fearful to discern, then success is hard to attain yet conceptual to vividly picture. However, he also declared that success required hope and

confidence and in that sense, success is real and attainable. I don’t know what was on his mind when he said these words. Maybe I am misinterpreting his message and he is not here to correct my interpretations. Despite his absence, his words remain important.

This is true for a country and people with a vision of attaining a First World status. We cannot achieve our success by chasing and shooting everything we come across.

Achieve

We cannot achieve our success by accumulating more wealth, gold, diamond, possessions and fame. We cannot achieve our success by manipulating other people or programming them or rather deceive them. I think many pupils who cheated in a test or examination can agree with me that after passing that paper they did not feel like they had achieved anything, because they used the wrong route to pass it.

Allow me, therefore, to say success is not the life of having everything. In other words, success is not about what you have, but it is about what you do with what you have. The book of Ecclesiastes declares that everything we gather for ourselves is just vanity. Therefore, as a country we should be honest with each other, we should state that we haven’t taken any step

towards our vision, especially if we do not know how it will look like. We want to be like America, England or South Africa and guess what, that will never happen.

Success at anything comes down to putting people at the centre of your life. People who worry more about what they want to be end up failing at every stage of their lives. However, people who worry more about what they want to do, feel successful at every stage of their lives.

Advice

It is, therefore, my advice that as a country we should worry more about what we want to do rather than what we want to be. Let us refrain from statements like; I want to be rich, I want to be an MP, I want to be this and that. But go for statements like; I want to improve the education
system, I want to increase the employment rate, I want to improve technology. These are the affirmations that can make us a great country and great people.

Colleen Hlanze

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