What is your career ambition or what is your aim of life ? – A question that starts hitting the youth from all the elders around. Initially, parents attempt to find this answer for their children and start influencing them accordingly. Slowly they give up and the children, as they grow to youth, take over to define their own life themselves. However, the right answer to this query is always elusive and keeps on changing as a young person gradually gets exposed to outside the world.
Some of us want to become doctors, some engineers or entrepreneurs and some of us just want to be happy and content. The definition of our goals has its roots in the environment where we are born and how we grow up. As we sail through the journey of our life, priorities and situations change, which in turn shifts our goal and creates new ambition. Whatever our ambition may be, the ultimate objective is to achieve success – another word as elusive as the word ambition.
Ambition is a moving target and even today many of us have not been able to fix it. Every day with new realization, aim of life keeps changing. So how can we tame this restless concept? How can we bring stability into our lives when we are a participant in the Rat Race?
When we think of success, we often think of money and power. But the pursuit of success can make you feel like you are playing “Hitman”: every time you land a hit, five more pop up from a different direction. We are under constant pressure to do more, achieve more, be more. Success is not so much a safe shore to reach. It is like a mirage that keeps on moving further as you approach it. It is very easy to watch people who are successful and think that the grass is always greener on the other side. We always overlook the fact that the grass is greener where we water it, and watering is not a flash in the pan. It is a continuous process.
How then to deal with it ? Let us listen to H. Jackson Brown, Jr. who rightly said, “The best preparation for tomorrow is to do your best today”. Therefore, our goal in life should be to improve our present status, daily, monthly, and annually. We should constantly move on to better pastures.
We should not strive for a distant goal and be frustrated because we cannot reach it. It is very important that we know what we are really capable of. Therefore, we should set small, achievable goals and feel like a winner every day. In doing so, we do not have to be envious or competitive with others. It’s not important what others have achieved, it’s not important to be the fastest. What is important is to run, and to run at your own pace, with the determination of finishing the race, not dropping out in the middle due to exhaustion.
Therefore, we must remember that it is important to do things every day that are productive, valuable, meaningful, and contribute in one way or another to the betterment of the society. This feel-good factor is very important to move ahead and keep going.
This upward movement does not necessarily mean that we are actually improving or making our lives better, but the feeling that we are growing is important. The thought that we are striving to make our lives better keeps our hopes alive and defines a purpose in life.
Will Smith summed it up, as the picture illustrates.
“Strive today for a better tomorrow”, may be a right slogan – A universal law of ambition, which holds good for everybody, across the globe at any point of his / her
1 thought on “Participating in the Rat Race”
Well written
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