Success is a collective process

We grew up with the learning that if we went to good schools we could be successful in our lives, we worked hard to get into good schools; the recent saga at Yale, et al, teaches us very wrongly that if you are successful you could send your kids to good schools, not a very good denouement as far as principles go.

More than that, the definition of success is itself skewed in this college admissions saga.

Success cannot be defined by the measure of passing through a narrow door by any means.

Success cannot be that unless you win you have failed, then by that count you are teaching your kid that better not venture into an initiative where chances of failure is high.

Statistically success is a chance event with a low probability whereas failure could be as close to certainty if you are a small percentage of the population competing.

Think of college admissions itself, what percentage is your chance of success, surely low if you go by the statistical probability of the unknown mass of applicants with unknown credentials. But your child would be undeterred by statistics and would put the best into the essay as if her life depended on it. So the effort that goes in even for a highly improbable result is far higher. This is where outcomes deviate from statistical expectations.

But suppose you teach your child that what only counts is winning, you are imbibing values that would take her away from peers, community, the stakeholders who must work in concert to make her achieve results in life. Nothing is achieved by working alone, rather most learning happens from the peers, subordinates, well-wishers, followers and the uninitiated.

For her to succeed she must know that many are failing to succeed as well and success is built by standing on the shoulder of large groups of people who have toiled but did not reach the final end of the pole.

In my daughter’s International School in Zurich there were no annual awards for those who did best in class, awards were reserved for those who showed maximum improvement in their subject scores during the year. By this method no one competed against other and collaboration for learning increased manifold.

Think of the student who is outstanding in her subjects, for her to get an award in this system would need Herculean effort, no wonder even the very best would need to toil and collaborate to contribute in the collective learning process.

The trophies of this world for the best and the finest would do far less than what they could to the multitudes who deserve a cheer for their efforts that fell short.

Success is therefore a collective process, sharing it would increase the chances of success.

I would end by defining the moral lens through which we see success. It is through the expectation of an outcome that we see our progress. If we meet the expectation we see success in it, so it is important that we create the right expectations as well.

But failure is an equally likely event and there must be empathy for it.

I am not intrigued by the empathy that failure exudes, while success is about that one fleeting moment when luck knocks on the door.

When we recount, memories are filled with the trying moments of endurance around failing to do what we dreamt to do, so little is reserved for that very small section when success made its mark. In fact success is forgotten the very moment it happens as the expectations get set for new bars.

Life is about that queer walk where what we choose to do and what we end up reaching is steeped in the rigor of a lens that is not ready to bow to the ‘expectation gap’ we are hardwired with.