What Do I Stand For
Mehreen Nazerali Versi (Arusha, Tanzania) is a published author, an avid reader, and a poet. She wrote her book; Spectrum of Happiness when she was 18 and published it a few years later. She writes articles covering several subject areas, and edits content both of academic and non-academic nature. She aims to build a community of critical readers who can read, question, and reason with content beyond what it says as plain text.
I
n life we end up at so many crossroads and have to make decisions that alter our course of life completely. Sometimes we can take our time, but other times it needs to be an immediate decision. I have to come to one of these crossroads once again. On one end I see endless success only while on the other I see my family bonds, friendships, and some fog as well. Could that be success waiting ahead or failure? Upon consulting people, some say that you need to make way for your success and if you keep looking out for others, they will leave you behind. While some say that the greatest success is in seeing others flourish. So should I leave all of my successes behind just for others?
Success simply means the achievement of aims and goals; so it entirely depends on what you wish to do with your skills, knowledge, and time. It is not wrong to want to use these to your advantage and grow in your field, but is that enough? If you share your knowledge it will not decrease in any way, rather you may learn a thing or two in the process. And if someone does surpass you in the end, that is their hard work, and maybe even business luck as they put it. This is a serious problem that needs to be tackled because it can cause hatred and jealousy in the long term.
Individualism and competition do not start at the business level, it goes way back to when a child is in school. We keep teaching that they need to be better than everyone else and also encourage they should not share what they know with others. Over decades, a ranking system was used which can be said to be the root cause of this where each student is given a rank based on their marks. A great step that is noticeable is that many schools have abolished this in order to avoid negative competition amongst students. Do parents however accept that or still go around asking and announcing their child’s marks?
When this kind of behaviour is rooted in a child’s mind, it demolishes the ability to think good about others and seeing their success is not an option for them. This simply means that they have failed. It is true that the world today has become extremely competitive with cutthroat business people and a saturated job market. What counts today though is not whether you were always the first in the competition, it is your character, values, behaviour, and compassion. There is a big rise in customer service in this era. Businesses have the same products to offer at fairly similar prices so it comes down to how you treat them, and give them that extra information that would help them. In addition, interviews also begin as soon as you step into a building and not when you sit down with the interviewer. How you treat everyone you see is a part of the interview that tells the company about what type of person you are.
So if I go back to my crossroads, I definitely choose empathy and companionship towards my loved ones. Success is only for a short time, while relationships are forever! And after this discussion, it is with great certainty that the fog, which was there, can only mean success for my loved ones, in this life and the hereafter and me.
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