Successful Happiness is in the Mind of the Beholder

I believe success is in the mind of the beholder, and I believe that happiness depends on success. But before you can be happy , you must determined what success is to you. We are taught that happiness and success intertwine at a very early age. Since the potty training days, you constantly set goal for yourself, and you constantly fail or succeed. However you might fail in your mind, but in someone else’s mind you might be completely successful.

I played on the high school golf team since I was in fourth grade. All four years of high school, we were in the hunt for the state championship. Two of the years we won, and two of the years we came in second. The two years we came in second, I don’t think any of us escaped without at least tearing up that we didn’t win. Our definition of success was winning, therefore in order to be happy with ourselves we had to win.

My senior year we were all gung-ho on winning, even though the odds weren’t with us. The first day was a practice round. The whole team played together, and I don’t think we said two words to each other. Imagine five high school girls together for five hours and we didn’t even talk. Why? We wanted to win, everything we did was serious. We were there to win and prove to everybody that we could do it even if we did lose two players.

In the middle of all this seriousness, I glanced over to another fairway and the sight bewildered me. Five girls competing for the same thing we were , and guess what they were doing ? Dancing. Yes, I said it, dancing. Here we were walking military style down the fairway, and they were over there dancing. Are you kidding me! The thought of it blew me away. But why were they doing that ? How could they ? We were all here for the same thing with the same goal, right?

After the tournament was over, and we lost, I decided to look for the “dancing team” on the scoreboard. Well, guess what? They didn’t even make the cut. I wandered around for a little while and saw the team, once again still having a good time and laughing. What are they doing? I thought. They shouldn’t even be here! They didn’t even make the cut! They didn’t have nothing to celebrate. Then I heard one of them burst out with, “Hey at least we made it here.”

Then it hit me. They didn’t care about winning because that wasn’t their success. Their success was just making it there and having a good time, and that is what they did. Our success was winning, and we lost. So we were all tearing up and hating on the winning team. That to me, defined how success is in the mind of the beholder and how success affects happiness.

I believe that you define success and you determine what success is. From that you come out with happiness or unhappiness.