Booker T. Washington offers an alternate view - that the best way to rank a success is to look at what a person has had to overcome in life. This view makes the struggle the central question. But is it more fair or honest than the more tangible rewards?

I would say yes.

For some people in today's society, it is almost impossible for them to fail and lose the physical rewards, or influence, or position gained. Think of how many 'starlets' and 'stars' are out there who make daily fools of themselves, yet they are, by the tangible markers, a success. Paris Hilton, to name one, is a success by failing on camera at many tasks ordinary people do day to day without thought. For another example, look to sports. There are several people held up as successes (if not role models) who would be judged completely opposite if they could not throw, hit, run, pass or shoot. Look to business, where power and money flow. For every person thought of as a true leader and a true success, such as Bill Gates and Jack Welch, there are tens who coast along doing nothing more or less than running a business and in many cases doing that badly.

All of the above examples, judged by the positions obtained and rewards gained, are successes. Only a few of them would be welcomed by most people as next door neighbors and dear friends.

On the flip side, there are people who had to struggle to make enough money to eat because they take care of elderly parents, or handicapped kids, or because of medical conditions. They may work in a job where they have to wear nametags and take orders, they may be completely powerless, and they may be unskilled if not nearly useless in the workforce. If the starlets, sports stars and business figures are at the top of a tangible chart of success, these people wouldn't even be ranked.

But people would respect them, seeing they work harder for better reasons. Not to get the newest model of Mercedes-Benz, but to keep the kids in clothes. Not to argue over whether they deserve an extra million for stealing bases, but to make sure their mom doesn't have to go to a nursing home. Not to demand a stock reward for not bankrupting the company, but to stay at home and give up things so their children will be safe.

There are exceptions to the rules, of course. There are successful people who also struggle to do better by others, and there are unsuccessful ones who are just as spoiled and selfish as the worst successful ones. But it comes down to something more than a bank account, or how many people answer your call. It comes down to how you handle yourself in everyday life, which may be rougher and harsher for you.

A small success to a people in tough times is almost always worth more than a large success to someone who has money, power, and influence to spare. I agree with Booker T. Washington.

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Struggle is, at its best, an ambiuous term that can be bandied around. I don't try to deny that my life has had very little struggle. I started high on the social ladder and then continued to go up. However, I believe it is misleading to say that struggle is the ultimate gauge of success in ones life because different people struggle against different things. To be born in the ghettos and into a world so hellish that it is beyond the average person's ability to comprehend is a struggle. Does that make a person successful? Not at all. Instead, it is how one meets those challenges and the adversity that they encounter and how they overcome them that ultimately will determine their success.

The actual struggles themselves are instead accomplishments of a sort. In a world where drugs are rampant and violence can affect even the most detached and remote of people, there is a struggle to stay calm. In a world where terrorism perpetuates itself and is promulgated as the greatest threat to freedom and democracy by a government that insists that we are over the edge of a paradigm shift in how the world works together and stands up for what is right, struggle is a common thing. To come out of struggle, bruised and hurt but victorious, however, that is accomplishment. To deal with problems that you encounter by engaging them is a struggle, but at the same time by making a difference you have an accomplishment.

There is a reason why accomplishments are heralded as a marker of success by so many, and that is because they are typically a sign of triumph of a person's will. There is a need to properly define what constitutes an accomplishment if you want to use it as a gauge of success in place of the struggles of a person. It is not an accomplishment for someone who doesn't have to overcome adversity to achieve something that a normal person could not. Paris Hilton did not have an accomplishment in making a music new album. There was no adversity for her to overcome, no test of will for her to pass. Instead, her money and her status brought all of the things she needed to her, and in the end her performance was barely mediocre for it. Instead, look at the people who make a real influence upon society. Look to the people who combat gangs and drugs by reaching out to their community. Their struggles go unpraised, as every success they have is someone we never read about committing a crime or overdosing on drugs or falling into any of the pitfalls of our society. But they have accomplishments as they have struggled against the forces of the world and succeeded where few are willing to go.

Struggle isn't something that everybody can face to the same degree. Our lives are constantly interweaving and no two people experience the exact same things. Our struggles will all be different, but what is important is not the struggles that we face in life, but instead how we overcome them. And when we look back at what we have done and the adversity we have faced, and see the accomplishments we have made, then we truly know the value of our lives through the success we have accomplished.

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To call struggle without accomplishment not successful flies in the face of ostensible American cultural values regarding respect for others and most importantly respect for hard word, but let's face it - hard work without success is nothing more than mechanics. As Ellen Griswold's father observed in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, a washing machine works hard. Ed Wood worked hard. A baseball mascot works hard (try one of those suits on some time). This is not success, merely effort.

On the other hand, to call simple accomplishment (achieving a goal without consideration of the effort involved in reaching it), successful is to ennoble every silver-spooned third generation hotel heiress, lottery winner or large donor's son. Merely collecting presents in the game of life is not success.

Therefore, both hard work and recovering from adversity (struggle) and accomplishment (realizing tangible rewards) are necessary for any true definition of 'success'.

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My brother married a Chicano women and one day we were talking about our improverished youth. My brother's wife recall a true and poignant story which remains with me years later. They were so poor as tenant farmers living in a one room shack with nine children that the father, who played the violin, would leave the house at night and lay down on his back between the rows af cabbage and play his violin to the stars.

One summer the family went on a picnic and a younger sister became ill. So ill, in fact, they took her to the hospital. Her fever rose at an alarming rate and the family feared for her life. The brothers and sisters filed past the sick child to show their concerns. The tiny girl was aware of her diemna and, in case the worse ocurred she wanted her siblings to have something to remember her by. But the family was so poor she had nothing to give her siblings. Desperate she pretended to take something out of her hand and place it in the hand of her brother or sister as they passed by her bed. They would hold out their hand and the little sister would tenderly place an imaginary remembrance gift in the waiting outstretched hand. Sad story but true.

All the brothers and sisters of the little girl still recall the day of their small sister's passing.

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According to Booker T. Washington, success is a relative measure, not an absolute. Becoming a bank president, or even President of the United States, is not as significant an achievement for someone who is merely following in his father's footsteps as it would be for someone who started life with fewer advantages, for example. George W. Bush, who seems to have something of a chip on his shoulder about being compared to his father, may for example feel that his accomplishment in being elected President is diminished by the fact that, as Anne Richardson put it, 'He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.'

But even when someone starts out with major advantages of birth, fortune and position, the degree of success may appear to be greater if many personal obstacles have had to be overcome on the way. In Bush's case, overcoming alcoholism, a rebelious youth, and a lack of academic and business success early in life has made his eventual success appear brighter. Adding a 'born again' religious experience allows many who might otherwise hold his priviledged background against him to identify with his success, appreciating the obstacles he has overcome.

Nevertheless, heros who start with fewer advantages appeal more strongly to the American myth of success, and it is for them that we reserve our highest regard. Although Barack Obama is a newcomer on the political scene, for example, his meteoric rise in visibility and the fact that he is being widely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate after less than one term in the Senate indicates that his personal story of a rise from hardship to success in spite of discrimination and lack of resources is one that resonates with the American public.

Most Americans, I believe, would agree with Mr. Washington's statement, although material success as well as the overcoming of obstacles has always been important in our country. But our greatest mythic figures of success, such as Abraham Lincoln and even Horatio Alger, have been poor men who fought through one obstacle after another before finally acheiving success, whether as moral leaders or in the material realm.

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Rhetorical excess, even to the point of hyperbole, is often necessary when one is attempting to convince an audience of a seemingly impossible or counter-intuitive conclusion. In the achievement-obsessed milieu of the United States, success is everything. The 'underdog,' that sentimental favorite, is an example of the ways in which success is fetishized in American culture. Similarly, the current popularity of superhero movies shows evidence of the audiences' need for success. Superheroes, almost by definition, need supervillains. Without an opponent who is able to match the superhero's mighty abilities, the inevitable success would feel anticlimactic. Instead, the superhero is always written into a situation in which he or she faces odds that would seem impossible even for a superhero. This reversal of might recasts the superhero as an underdog, facing insurmountable challenges. Of course, the superhero *does* surmount those challenges, and ends the film as a victor.

It is this combined nature of success and challenge, though, that provides narrative satisfaction to audiences. One without the other becomes either masturbatory or tragic. Success without challenge is boring wish-fulfilment, absent any real sense of tension or conflict. Without success, challenge poses a very different sensation to American audiences. The first *Rocky* film shows the difficult and rare pleasures of challenge without success. Rocky's defeat at the end of the film is rare in American mainstream cinema, but by shifting the markers of success, we can see Rocky's fight with Apollo Creed as a victory in itself. Rocky cannot win the fight, but by making it to the fight, and by trying his best, Rocky wins, even in defeat.

Booker T. Washington is attempting to destabilize any facile adoration of success by pointing to the necessary condition of challenge. Besides the narrative imperative of having both, and the psychological needs expressed by it, Washington also attempts to inject an ethical mode into our culture of success. Success at any cost can too easily lead to tyranny and abuses of power. Instead, by reenergizing and valorizing the worthiness of attempting challenging feats, Washington reminds us that claiming the easy prize is less worthy of praise than attempting, and failing, to reach that which is always just beyond our grasp. And when we attempt the challenging, we succeed in ways that cannot be measured against simple win/lose dichotomies.

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I believe Churchill also remarked something to the effect that greatness is not defined by one's successes, but by one's capacity to continue after failures. Again it is the qualities of character that constitute perseverance-the willingness to struggle against the odds-which in the end define success.

Camus also explored this theme in his novel 'The Plague.' Although it has been decades since I read 'The Plague' I recall that it's theme was that heroism-akin to a kind of 'success'-is measured by one's willingness to put one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. This theme is appealing as well in its egalitarian application. Each of us has the potential to succeed by overcoming obstacles.

On the other side, reaching elevated positions in life is often an accident of birth. We need look no further than our current President, George W. Bush, for a demonstration of that proposition. One could even say that the absence of any necessity for struggle in his life is the cause of his lack of success (see, for example, Iraq, Katrina, among others).

In my own life I often derive strength from looking back at times when I struggled and succeeded. My daughter was born prematurely, at a time when her older brother was still a baby. I am (and was) self-employed running my own business. I didn't sleep for weeks. I was constantly worried and anxious. But every day was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other (even though one day, I recall, I appeared in a public setting in connection with my job with two mismatched shoes!). I am more proud of myself, for having gotten through that without a mental breakdown, then perhaps any other 'success' in my life.

To the same effect, when I was 21 years old I went to Europe by myself, with a backpack and a Eurorail pass. The fact that I was able to meet all the various challenges of the journey changed me. I returned home a different person.

I don't think there is any doubt that it is the experience, the struggle, not the result, which is the best measure of one's character. And character, in the end, is what success is all about. It is not our material possessions nor our elevated positions which define us, but (to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King) the content of our characters.

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It is all too easy to set unrealistic goals, to make a show of striving for them, and to expect a consoling and congratulating pat on the back for the effort. More important is to set goals that are meaningful and at least plausibly realistic, and set about with all our vigor to accomplish them.

I'm reminded of the Gordian knot in the literature of Greek mythology. What the wisest in the kingdom could not accomplish with all their greatest efforts, Alexander accomplished by simplifying the problem to the sweep of a blade. A meaningful goal is one where the problem is seen clearly. Often the most satisfying solution is a simple one that emerges from a clear understanding of the problem.

When the problems are compelling ones, the efficacy of the solution is far more important than the effort put into it. A starving family made so by great effort of will is not more to be desired than a well-fed family made so by little effort.

So it is with most of our life's works. Less effort for more results gives us a greater advantage and leads to more satisfaction most of the time.

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The achievements of somebody who struggles to overcome huge obstacles to achieve modest goals are simply of a different, and not comparable, nature to those of the well-prepared, ably-assisted, and naturally-gifted individual who achieves the truly exceptional. Both are admirable; both serve as inspirational examples.

The example of the struggle to overcome obstacles to achieve is a staple of fables both ancient and modern; certainly, it is a staple of American film, from 'The Mighty Ducks' to 'A Beautiful Mind' amongst innumerable others. But the implication that we should ignore the truly exceptional, if achieved from an already privileged position, is something I cannot support.

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It's all about struggles for scarce resources, whether economic, social, cultural or whatever. The bottom line, though, is all about what Rowbotham calls 'The importance of being noticed.' Each of us, he or she or in between, seeks the approval of our peers, however defined. For those of us at the fringes of society, we find alternative honor codes. Islamist fascists come to mind. Even so, all of us fall somewhere on the scale/continuum, each longing to feel important.

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This realism rides the razor's edge between optimism and pessimism, between being blessed and being damned, between looking backward and seeking forward.

The struggle of human history at least seems the assault on a pinnacle of achievement. An acadamy-award winning file, Why Man Creates, provided an illustrated version of this; yet, at the top (at the time, the mid-20th Century), humans are standing in a radioactive cloud, unable to see a clear direction.

Nonetheless, from stone, to bronze, to iron, to steam, to space age, our technical achievements our without question. Our wisdom, however, has always been a subject of protracted discussion.

A tribe in South America has the perspective we follow the arrow of time backwards. We can see the past but the future comes upon our shoulders from the rear. The people of television (for they are truly an separate tribe) often look forward; science fiction has given us our hopes and nightmares of the future; but as a prognosticator, science fiction's success is a mixed bag.

At the dawn of the 21st Century, we have no moonbases and no mysterious artifacts orbiting distant gas planets to pull us into space. But, we do have the challenge that has always faced the human race and so succinctly put by a little-known citizen of Los Angeles, Rodney King: 'Can't we all just get along?'

The answer depends on one's perspective: optimist, pessemist, or realist. Two dueling axioms are: 'That which does not kill you, makes you stronger' and the retort 'That which does not kill you simply cripples you and you have to live with it your whole life.' The realist knows it's how we deal with our challenges--and not the challenges themselves--that define us.

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If the measure of success were the mere achievement of one's goals, it would be trivially easy to be a success simply by setting your expectations as low as possible. Achieving the goal of eating a bag of chips while watching MTV is not an inspiring moment in a human life well lived. As well, even if one is pursuing more challenging goals, some of these may involve challenge but have little intrinsic value. Once you succeeding in memorizing the value of pi to a hundred decimal places, what have you learned beyond the capacity of your memory, and what has the world gained from your feat? Finally, even if one aspires to lofty goals, like curing cancer, achieving these may involve an element of luck. It seems cruel that one's success as a human being might turn on circumstances beyond one's control.

The accomplishments that reveal something about your character and your values are those that are hard-fought. Unless you are willing to risk failure in the pursuit of your goals, these goals are, in a sense, not really yours. Rather, they are goals you will pursue if there is a reasonable likelihood of achieving them. If the chances of failure are great enough, you can live without them.

Values and goals that are central to your being, however, are valued regardless of whether there is a clear and easy path by which to achieve them. They are things you care about so deeply that you would fight for them even if your failure was assured, since to do otherwise would be to deny their value to you. In a way, our deepest values are parts of us that might transcend our death, so our efforts to reach them are our best chance at immortality.

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In today's world, those perceived as 'successful' are those who receive the greatest degree of positive media exposure. While this may not be a good or honorable definition of success, it is an accepted one. When asked to identify 'successful' people, most people would name television, movie and sports stars (and occasionally politicians). Rarely would people name 'average' citizens who may have achieved their goals and overcom significant obstacles along the way. Similarly, the obstacles overcome by the aforementioned 'successful' people are often unknown or overlooked.

There are certainly exceptions to this: for example, the success of Lance Armstrong following his Tour de France victories was certainly enhanced by his overcoming cancer. However, Armstrong is not perceived as being MORE successful than Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, who did not face the obstacles he did. Similarly, Bill Gates is considered more successful than Stephan Hawking, despite Hawking's overcoming serious physical (and probably emotional) challenges.

Therefore, Booker T. Washington's theory of defining succes, while noble, probably does not reflect the view of today's popular culture.

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'Struggle' is a an activity or something composed out of several activities. Activities cannot be quantified (only their number and their effects can be quantified). Thus if 'struggle' is taken as a single activity: it cannot be used as a measure for anything. If 'struggle' is taken as something composed out of several activities we have to take into account that each activity can be divided into an (almost?) infinite number of sub-activities; as it is not feasible to compare (almost) infinite numbers: 'struggle' is taken as something composed out of several activities and compared to other 'struggles' by the number of activities is no useful measure for anything either.

Next: 'struggle' is not the result of success, but the way to success. A way to something can not be a measure for the thing it leads to. Thus even if it were possible to calibrate and measure 'struggle' it would not be a usable measure for success.

Third: 'success' and 'accomplishment' are almost interchangeable terms. 'Struggle' is no term that has a meaning 'near' to 'success'. In order to use it as a measure for success (even if it were a usable measure for success) would mean to change the relation these words have in our language. By changing such relation we render the language incomprehensible. If you can understand this essay it is because I didn't go for such changes.

If, however you do not understand this essay: this is probably the proof for the thesis that 'struggle' is indeed an apt 'measure' for success.

Decide yourself . .

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