Focus

There is a certain truth to the idea of "define or be defined" which is one of the insights that has a much higher meaning than simply success. Success and failure are both instrumental in making of our personal meaning, but we also reside in a technological world defined by a language of code, so the idea of "program or be programmed" that Douglas Rushkoff introduced is also poignant and pertinent in this 21st Century idea of "define". Yet we are also addressing here of this idea of "in our own terms" - so what are we defining if we define our own terms - who are we are defining them to. This constant preoccupation with what others think of us informs that defining, and I have never met anyone who has escaped that occupation, but then again I have never met a complete psychopath with complete narcissistic tendencies, nor have I gone outside of my defined urban jungle into the wilderness to stumble upon someone who did not want to be found. I do not know why I should be proud to live my life, is not the act of living a life an entire challenge unto itself? If I am proud to live my life is pride separate from who I am? Am I not that pride? If I am that pride then the truth of what I am proud of is an essential personal query - for I would like to know where this source of pride originated from - since I am that. Building a life is how I would view life if I was engineer, for the word "building" is a professional construct. Is my life purpose simply architecture? Can my purpose transform as I learn? Or am I "built" that way, never able to change. These are questions not of success but of life. If i was reviled by my own community and only six people attended my funeral and those six saw me get buried in a paupers grave, am I success? That answer has already been established in my mind because I view Thomas Paine as a success - he was one of the writers that inspired the American Revolution and he did not back down from his truths and so was afforded an ignominious farewell. The word success is that relative but today it is meant to mean "professional". In Thomas Paine's world success was meaning itself and it was life, success was not THE meaning, but once bodily cell in the body called meaning. Yet 99.999% of the people who contribute to LinkedIn will one day be forgotten, gone with the dust. There are kids in my family who do not know who Elvis Presley is or was - and they don't care too much either if he was a success or not. That is life, eventually history remembers less and less of us, but at least good old Aristotle is still going strong. We can either trust a translated reading of Aristotle or we can appreciate a students view https://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~dhutchin/j18a.htm So the word success is simply a philosophical quest that we define as a material quest - and that brings us right back to making meaning. [CityVP Manjit - 01 Mar 2016 - Transformer & Mind]